How to Grow Microgreens: The Complete Guide for Beginners

Last updated: August 2, 2026

Growing Microgreens at Home for Salads & Garnishes

Microgreens go from dry seed to harvest in 7–14 days on a countertop, with no garden, no outdoor space, and no growing season. The whole setup is a shallow tray, a couple of centimetres of growing medium, a light source, and seed you already recognize from the produce aisle. A single 25 × 50 cm (10 × 20 inch) tray fits on a windowsill and produces a few hundred grams of cut greens.

What makes them worth the tray space is what happens biochemically at the cotyledon stage. A seedling has spent its stored starch pushing up a shoot, and those first leaves become the plant’s entire photosynthetic and nutrient-accumulating engine. That is the moment you cut them. This guide covers the equipment that earns its space, 15 varieties compared side by side, published seeding rates and blackout times crop by crop, the light and humidity adjustments that decide whether a tray comes out clean or moldy, the food-safety practices that matter in a home kitchen, and what a tray is worth if you decide to sell what you grow.

Microgreens vs. Sprouts

Microgreens are grown in a medium and harvested at 7–21 days by cutting the shoot above the soil line. Sprouts are germinated in water with no medium and eaten whole — seed, root, and shoot — in 2–5 days. The distinction matters more than it looks, because the two techniques share almost nothing: sprouting is a rinse-and-drain cycle in a jar, in darkness, with no growing medium at any point. The complete guide to growing sprouts at home walks through that jar method start to finish.

Regulators draw the same line. The US Food and Drug Administration’s final sprout guidance states plainly that microgreens and sprouts are different products: sprouts are harvested while the cotyledons are still undeveloped, whereas microgreens reach the stage where true leaves begin to emerge, are grown in soil or substrate, and are cut above the substrate line. Microgreens are therefore not subject to the sprout rules in Subpart M of the Produce Safety Rule, though they remain covered produce under its other subparts.

Microgreens take the plant one stage further. Seed goes into a shallow layer of coir, potting mix, or a fibre mat; germination happens in darkness under a weighted cover; then the tray comes into the light until the cotyledons open. You cut above the medium and leave the roots behind. The result belongs on a plate as a salad ingredient or a finishing garnish rather than in a jar. Neither method is better — plenty of growers run both, jars for a daily nutritional habit and trays for flavour and texture.

Growing Microgreens Year-Round Indoors

Microgreens have no season. A tray completes its cycle in under three weeks at ordinary room temperature, so what is happening outdoors is irrelevant to everything except your growing room’s temperature and light. University of Maryland Extension’s microgreens and baby greens guide puts the working range at 21–24°C (70–75°F), with cabbage-family seed germinating in roughly 36 hours at the warm end of it. Ordinary heated living space across North America sits just under that, which is close enough for every variety in this guide; supplemental heat only becomes necessary when a room drops below about 16°C (60°F), as unheated basements and attached garages do through a Prairie or Upper Midwest winter.

Space requirements are small enough that apartment growing is the norm rather than the compromise. Two trays in rotation occupy about 50 × 50 cm (20 × 20 inches) of shelf, and a single 20-watt LED panel over a two-shelf rack is enough to keep a household of four in cut greens every week once the rotation is running.

Microgreen Nutrition

Why Microgreens Concentrate More Nutrients Than Mature Leaves

Microgreens hit their nutritional peak at the cotyledon stage, and the mechanism is straightforward: the seed has emptied its starch reserves into the shoot, and the cotyledons are now doing all the photosynthesis and all the nutrient accumulation for a plant that has no other leaves. The reference measurement is a 2012 USDA and University of Maryland study of 25 commercially grown microgreens, published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry as an assessment of edible microgreens, which measured vitamin C, vitamin E, vitamin K, and carotenoid concentrations against published values for the mature leaves of the same plants.

The honest version of that finding is more useful than a single headline number. There is no single multiplier: USDA’s own shorthand for the study is that microgreens ran roughly five times the nutrient density of mature leaves on average, but the real spread runs from about three-fold (cilantro beta-carotene) to enormously higher for particular nutrient-and-variety pairs. Treat “microgreens have more nutrients” as a claim about specific compounds in specific crops, not a blanket property of the category.

Choosing Microgreens for Specific Nutrients

Red cabbage carried the highest vitamin C of the 25 varieties tested, at 147 mg per 100 g fresh weight. Green daikon radish topped the vitamin E table at 87.4 mg per 100 g — worth knowing, because radish is also the fastest and most forgiving tray in this guide. Cilantro led on lutein and zeaxanthin at 10.1 mg per 100 g, and red sorrel on beta-carotene at 12.1 mg per 100 g. Pea tendrils measured 8.2 mg per 100 g of beta-carotene, though a golden-tendril cultivar in the same study came in roughly thirteen times lower, so cultivar matters as much as species.

Broccoli needs a more careful answer, because the famous figure does not belong to the microgreen stage. The 1997 Johns Hopkins work that started all of this measured three-day-old sprouts, not seedlings at day ten. Fahey and Kensler’s 2021 Frontiers review is explicit that germination and growth merely dilute the glucoraphanin already present in the seed, up to somewhere around day 10–14 — the seed itself is the richest source, and every day of growth spreads that fixed quantity through more plant tissue.

Broccoli microgreens are still an excellent tray, and per gram they carry more glucoraphanin than a mature head. But if sulforaphane is specifically why you are growing, a three-day jar sprout beats a ten-day tray — and the same bag of seed does both.

Where a nutrient claim has not been measured at the microgreen stage, this guide does not make one. Sunflower is a good example: it is a documented source of zinc as a microgreen, but the vitamin E and protein figures that circulate for it belong to the dry mature kernel, which is a different food. Beet microgreens contain betalains, but no published per-100 g figure for raw beet microgreens exists to quote.

Best Seeds for Growing Microgreens

Radish, curly cress, and buckwheat are the easiest microgreens for a first tray — all three germinate within 48 hours and are ready to cut in 6–12 days. Most first-tray failures come from starting with something slow and fussy, usually basil or cilantro, before the technique is solid. Build the habit on a fast, forgiving seed, then move to the nutritional heavyweights once you know what a healthy tray looks like on day four.

Radish and cress germinate uniformly within 24–48 hours and reach a cut in under eight days, which means you see the entire process — germination, blackout, greening, harvest — inside a single week. Buckwheat is equally forgiving with the advantage of large seed you can watch swelling, so the germination stage stops being guesswork. Any one of the three teaches the whole technique before you have spent much on seed.

Once the process is repeatable, the slower varieties earn their extra days. Broccoli is the nutritional anchor of most rotations and the variety worth growing every week, and the same seed doubles as the fastest jar sprout there is — the guide to sprouting broccoli seeds covers that method. Sunflower and pea give the most substantial texture, which is why they dominate market tables. Beet, cilantro, basil, and garlic chive are the ones to add last — slower germination and tighter temperature windows punish a loose technique.

Whatever you sow has to be untreated. Seed dressed with fungicide is not food, and US law requires treated seed to be labelled “Do not use for food” under the Department of Agriculture’s treated-seed labelling rule, with the Environmental Protection Agency separately requiring an approved dye that gives the seed an unnatural colour — most often pink or green. There is no standard colour code, so treat any unnaturally coloured seed as treated. Seed sold for sprouting and microgreens is processed for food use and germination-tested, which also means fewer dead seeds crowding the tray.

Equipment for Growing Microgreens

A complete microgreens setup is five items: a 10 × 20 tray with drain holes, a matching solid tray beneath it, 2.5–4 cm (1–1.5 in) of growing medium, a light source, and sharp scissors. Everything else on the list below is a refinement. The trays and the light are reusable indefinitely, so the ongoing cost of the hobby is seed and medium.

Choosing a Growing Medium for Microgreens

Coconut coir is the best all-purpose medium for microgreens: it holds moisture without going waterlogged, rehydrates from compressed bricks at very little per tray, and carries a far lower weed-seed and pathogen load than garden soil. Oklahoma State University Extension’s Soilless Growing Mediums puts coir in the mildly acidic band at pH 5.8–6.8, which suits every crop in this guide. One correction worth making, because it is repeated everywhere: coir is not sterile. Peer-reviewed work on coir as a microgreen substrate has measured meaningful bacterial and fungal populations in untreated product, which is why commercial growers who chase the last percentage point of disease control pasteurize it. For home trays that is unnecessary — a fresh brick is clean enough.

A basic seed-starting mix is a fine substitute. What does not work is garden soil or any mix carrying chunky compost: it compacts under the blackout weight, drains badly, and brings its own fungal load into a warm, dark, humid tray. Depth matters more than the medium itself. Microgreens need only 2.5–4 cm (1–1.5 in) — enough for roots to anchor, shallow enough that the medium never stays saturated. Level the surface with a flat piece of cardboard before sowing, because a low spot in the tray becomes a wet spot, and a wet spot becomes the place mold starts. If you are already starting transplants under lights, the same principles carry over from starting seeds indoors, just at a fraction of the depth.

Growing Microgreens Without Soil

Microgreens grow perfectly well with no soil at all. A hemp, jute, or coconut-fibre grow mat sits in a solid tray, wicks water from below, and carries most varieties to harvest. Mats are pre-cut to the standard 10 × 20 footprint — soak, lay in the tray, sow directly on top. Nothing loose ever touches the kitchen counter, and at harvest the whole root mat lifts out in one piece.

The trade-offs are real but narrow. Mats cost more per tray than coir and dry out faster in low-humidity rooms, so arid-climate growers check moisture twice a day rather than once. They also perform best with small seed — broccoli, kale, radish, arugula, cress — because large pre-soaked seed like sunflower and pea puts down heavy roots that a thin mat anchors less securely. For those, a shallow layer of coir gives a more reliable stand.

How to Grow Microgreens from Seed

Microgreens go from sowing to harvest in 7–14 days across five phases: tray preparation, sowing, a weighted blackout, light exposure, and cutting. Each phase has one variable that decides the outcome — level medium, seed density, weight, water from below, and harvest timing, in that order.

Sowing Microgreen Seeds

Sow into levelled, evenly damp medium at a density where seed sits shoulder to shoulder in a single layer without stacking. Density is the variable that decides whether a tray breathes or molds, and it is the number worth pinning down before anything else.

Published seeding rates are rarer than they should be. Utah State University Extension’s Grow Your Own Microgreens is the most useful source available, giving both a per-crop seed weight and a dark-phase length for a standard 10 × 20 tray. Its figures are worth reading against the generic advice elsewhere: Penn State and University of Maryland Extension both put a standard tray at 10–15 g of seed, which holds for fine brassicas but is four times too little for radish and three times too little for sunflower. That disagreement is real, and the per-crop numbers are the ones to trust.

How Long to Blackout Microgreens

The blackout is the weighted dark phase between sowing and greening, and it is what produces thick, upright stems instead of a thin sprawling stand. Darkness makes the seedling stretch for light; the weight makes it push back against resistance and thicken. Both effects need the tray covered by a second inverted tray, weighted with a jug of water or a few books, kept in contact with the medium for roughly the first half of the dark period.

Duration is not one number, and a flat figure applied to every crop is the most common cause of a failed tray. Fast brassicas — arugula, kale, radish — want only 1–2 days; sunflower and pea want 3; basil wants 4–7; and cilantro can sit covered for 7–14. Running a fast brassica for four days because a generic instruction said so produces exactly the pale, over-stretched, collapsing tray the blackout is supposed to prevent. Lift a corner once daily to confirm the medium is still damp, and uncover as soon as the seedlings have lifted the cover or reached 2–4 cm (1–1.5 in), whichever comes first.

Moving Microgreens Into the Light

Remove the blackout cover once seedlings reach 2–4 cm (1–1.5 in) tall or have visibly lifted the tray above them, then give them 12–16 hours of bright light a day. They will look alarming at first: pale yellow, slightly stretched, folded over. Chlorophyll develops fast, and within 24–48 hours the whole tray greens up and straightens.

This is also the moment watering changes permanently. Set the drainage tray inside the solid tray, pour water into the bottom tray, let the medium drink from below for 20–30 minutes, then pour off whatever is left standing. Water never touches the canopy again. A dry canopy is the single most effective mold control there is, and it is the reason two growers using the same seed and the same tray get opposite results. Keep a grow light 15–30 cm (6–12 in) above the canopy, or use the brightest window you have.

Harvesting Microgreens

Cut microgreens at the medium line once the cotyledons are fully open and the first true leaves are only just appearing — day 6–8 for radish and cress, day 9–14 for broccoli, kale, sunflower, and pea. Past that point flavour turns bitter and stems toughen, so the window is worth watching daily rather than weekly.

Pea is the one variety that reliably gives a second cut. Washington State University Extension’s pea shoots bulletin explains the mechanism: as long as one leaf node remains on the stem below the cut, the plant carries on growing and can be harvested again, with the first cutting the best in quality and later ones still good. Everything harvested at the cotyledon stage — broccoli, kale, radish, sunflower, buckwheat — has no growing point left below the cut, and University of Maryland Extension states it flatly for microgreens generally: the seedlings will not regrow.

Storing Microgreens After Cutting

Harvested microgreens hold 5–7 days in the fridge, a figure UConn Extension’s microgreens fact sheet gives and Purdue Extension repeats, with the honest caveat from Purdue that long-term microgreen storage is still an open research question. Store them in a glass or rigid container lined with a dry paper towel, lid on. Never seal them wet; trapped moisture turns a good tray to slime in two days.

Two habits do more for shelf life than the container does. Stopping water 12 hours before cutting means the greens go into storage dry at the stem, and harvesting in the morning while the plants are turgid means they enter the fridge at full water content in the tissue rather than wilting first. Cut greens that go straight from tray to fridge within the hour keep noticeably better than a tray cut and left on the counter through the afternoon.

Climate Adjustments for Growing Microgreens Indoors

Microgreens are grown indoors, but the room they are grown in belongs to a climate. Ambient temperature, humidity, and available light are the three variables local conditions push around, and they explain why identical technique produces a spotless tray in one house and a moldy one two provinces away.

When Microgreens Need a Grow Light

A bright south-facing window carries microgreens from roughly April through September across most of North America. From October through March, a 20–45 W LED on a 16-hours-on timer is what stands between a firm tray and a pale, leggy one. The reason is not temperature but day length and intensity — below about 12 hours of usable light, seedlings stretch for it and fall over. The further north the growing room, the longer that shortfall lasts, and cloud cover matters as much as latitude. December day lengths below are calculated from the US Naval Observatory’s sun and moon data tables for representative cities in each band.

Any full-spectrum LED in the 20–45 W range will do the job; microgreens are cut before they need the intensity a fruiting plant demands. Hang it 15–30 cm (6–12 in) above the canopy and put it on a plug timer so the 16-hour cycle runs itself. If you are choosing a panel that also has to carry tomato and pepper transplants in spring, the comparison in the buyer’s guide to grow lights for seedlings covers what to look for at that higher bar.

Succession Sowing Microgreens for a Weekly Harvest

Sowing one fresh tray every 7 days produces a continuous weekly harvest. With four trays in rotation, one is always in blackout, one is under light, and one is ready to cut. A single tray, by contrast, is eaten in two to five days and then the counter is empty for a week and a half. The rotation is the difference between a novelty and a food supply.

Turnaround on a finished tray is about five minutes: lift the root mat to the compost, rinse the tray, refill, resow. Four trays in rotation need roughly 0.2 m² (2 sq ft) of shelf and about fifteen minutes of attention a day once the rhythm settles. Write the sow date on a strip of masking tape and stick it to the tray rim — that one habit removes every “which tray is this?” question from the process. Put pea in the rotation more often than the schedule suggests if you want the extra cut; the full guide to growing peas from sprouts to harvest covers shoot varieties and the node-height cut in more detail.

Selling Microgreens at Farmers Markets & Restaurants

A well-sown 10 × 20 tray yields 90–425 g (3–15 oz) of cut greens depending on variety, and the two published extension budgets put realistic pricing between $40 and $64 per pound (0.45 kg). The economics work because the input is seed, water, and about two weeks of shelf space, and because restaurants buy on a standing weekly order rather than a one-off. It is one of the few food crops where a spare bedroom can generate real revenue.

Yield figures deserve more scepticism than they usually get. Two credible sources exist and they disagree substantially: the University of Missouri Extension microgreens planning budget measures yield per 10 × 20 tray directly, while a 2023 seventeen-species trial in Frontiers in Plant Science reports yield per square metre on hydroponic mats under fertigation, which scales to a tray but flatters the numbers of anything grown that way. Where they conflict, the table below gives both.

Pricing is better documented than yield. Penn State Extension’s Growing Microgreens reports microgreens moving at $1.75 for a half-ounce direct-market pack, which works out near $56 per pound, and $40 per pound wholesale in 14-gallon totes; Missouri’s budget assumes $4.00 per ounce, or $64 per pound, across every variety. There is no USDA price series for microgreens — the crop is not tracked in federal market news — so extension budgets are the closest thing to a primary figure that exists.

Two things separate a market grower from a hobbyist. The first is consistency: a chef ordering 200 g of pea shoots every Thursday needs 200 g every Thursday, which means running one more tray than the order requires and treating that spare as insurance rather than surplus. The second is food-safety practice — clean trays, seed sold for food use rather than field planting, a dry canopy, and cold storage within the hour. Regulations for selling cut greens vary by province and by state, so confirm the local requirements before your first market day.

Troubleshooting Microgreens

Almost every microgreen failure traces to one of three causes: seed sown too densely, water sitting on the canopy, or too little light after the blackout phase. The table below pairs the visible symptom with the trigger behind it and the correction that fixes the next tray.

Microgreens Food Safety

Microgreens sit in an unusual regulatory position: safer than sprouts, but not as safe as the tray on a kitchen counter makes them feel. Recalls happen — Canadian and US regulators have pulled branded broccoli and mixed microgreens off shelves for Salmonella, Listeria and pathogenic E. coli several times in recent years, and in one 2022 US case the contamination was traced back to the bagged growing medium rather than the seed. None of those recalls reported confirmed illnesses, which is the system working, but they do explain why the handling below is worth the five minutes it costs.

Why Microgreens Carry Less Risk Than Sprouts

The difference is measurable rather than intuitive. USDA Agricultural Research Service scientists deliberately contaminated radish seed with two strains of pathogenic E. coli and grew it out both ways; their sprout and microgreen comparison found bacterial populations on the harvested sprouts 1,000 to 100,000 times greater than on the microgreens from the same seed. Their conclusion was that the conditions used to grow microgreens are simply less amenable to bacterial growth. Penn State Extension attributes the gap partly to light exposure, which sprouts never get.

Three practical consequences follow. Microgreens are not covered by the sprout-specific rules described earlier, so the seed-lot testing regime that applies to commercial sprouts does not apply here. The at-risk advice that comes with raw sprouts — children, older adults, pregnant people and immunocompromised people avoiding them raw or lightly cooked — does not transfer automatically to microgreens. And the risk that remains lives mostly in the medium, the water and the tray rather than in the growing method itself.

Keeping a Microgreens Tray Clean

Penn State Extension’s Ensuring Food Safety in Microgreens Production sets out the practice, and its blunt central line is worth keeping in mind while cleaning trays: you cannot sanitize dirt. Physical cleaning has to come first — scrub the tray until it is visibly clean — and only then does a food-safe sanitizer do anything useful. Municipal tap water needs no treatment or testing for soaking, rinsing and irrigation; a private well does.

The instruction that surprises most home growers is about washing. Post-harvest rinsing is not recommended unless a batch demands it, because water on freshly cut stems can spread contamination through a batch rather than remove it, and the damaged tissue that a rinse causes shortens shelf life as well. Cut dry, chill fast, and wash at the point of eating if you want to. Alongside that: buy seed processed for food use rather than field planting, use fresh bagged medium instead of garden soil, keep the canopy dry, and get cut greens into the fridge within the hour.

🌍 A Short History of Microgreens

Microgreens are one of the youngest crops in the kitchen — a chef’s invention from the 1980s that grew out of a much older habit of eating seedlings.

Microgreens FAQ

Related Guides