Growing Sunflower Sprouts for Healthy Microgreens

Looking for fresh greens to ramp up your salads? Sunflower sprouts — or microgreens — are easy to grow in a sunny windowsill and will be ready to eat in about a week. 

Try growing popcorn shoots, too!

Sunflower sprouts are a bit chunkier than some of the other microgreens you might be familiar with. They have a bit of a nutty flavor and provide a nice, hearty crunch in salads and sandwiches. When fresh greens are hard to come by, keep several trays of these easy-to-grow sprouts in rotation.

Growing edible sunflower sprouts

There are a couple of options when it comes to finding sunflower seeds for sprouting. You can order organic seeds, packaged up specifically for sprouting, but that can get expensive. Another option is to pick up a big bag of black oil sunflower seeds — the kind people use for birdseed. That’s what I’ve used here.

You’ll need:

• a recycled plastic salad container (or similar)
• potting soil
• raw sunflower seeds

Directions:

Fill container with about 2″ of potting soil. Make certain that the container has drainage holes to allow excess water to escape. Scatter seeds over the soil. In this case, don’t worry about overcrowding the seeds – the wee sprouts don’t mind being crowded. You want the seeds to be in a pretty solid single layer on top of the soil.

Cover sunflower seeds with a layer of potting soil about 1″ thick. Water thoroughly and close the plastic lid, if your container has one. This helps to retain moisture until the seeds sprout.

Place in a sunny window, being sure to use a drainage container underneath it to capture moisture. In two or three days you’ll see sunflower sprouts start to appear. At this point, if you’re using a salad container with the lid, you’ll want to open the lid to give the growing sprouts room to grow. Watch the growing sunflower sprouts carefully and water as needed to keep the soil damp but not overly wet.

In another couple of days, the sunflower sprouts will be 2-3″ tall and ready to harvest. Don’t let them get much taller than that.

To harvest, simply use scissors to snip them off at the base. The outer seed casings tend to be a bit clingy, so I like to put the trimmed sprouts in a colander and rinse gently under water to remove them.

Use these sunflower sprouts as you would any other microgreen: Add to salads, sandwiches, and wraps. They’re also great added to a fruit smoothie for a little extra nutrition!

Winter greens

You can grow microgreens year-round, but they have a special appeal during the winter months when fresh greens from the garden are a bit sparse. Other options for winter greens to consider:

• Grow lettuce indoors
• Broccoli sprouts
• Sweet potato vines (yes, really!)
• Bean sprouts
• Lentil sprouts

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