Growing seeds for sprouting

Sprouted seeds are one of the most nutritious foods we can eat and they’re so easy to produce. Isabell Shipard’s book, How can I grow and use sprouts as living food? covers over 100 kinds of sprouting seeds and is a reference well worth having:

I use fenugreek seeds pretty much exclusively for sprouting. I have tried wheat, but I like the nutty, slightly curryish flavour of fenugreek best. I throw a handful into any dish—omelets, sandwiches, salads, garnish on soup, etc. I sprout about a teaspoon of dry seed a week and that keeps me going.

So, of course, a few years ago, I tried growing fenugreek. It’s so easy; germinates in a few days when sown in autumn; grows through the winter; flowers in spring and sets seed in long curved pods. It’s relatively easy to strip the pods from the plants when they’re dry, but fiddly and time-consuming to get the seeds out of the pods. Last year I discovered the Thermomix is ideal for extracting seed from pods.

Empty pods:

Seeds:

Sprouts:

I got about a dozen teaspoonfuls of seed from plants in a circular area 80 cm in diameter, about half a square metre in area. That’s about 3 months supply for sprouting. So in just a couple of square metres, I could grow a year’s supply. Well worth doing, particularly as the health food shop where I used to buy the seeds has since closed and (apart from buying in bulk from seed suppliers) there’s nowhere else locally I can get them.