The Tactical Advantage of Survival Sprouting For Permaculture Warriors TPS-0131

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What are Seeds?

Seeds are technically alive, slowly consuming their energy reserves, waiting for the opportunity to sprout forth into life as a plant. Many seeds will still germinate for years if stored properly. Recently, scientists successfully sprouted a record breaking 2000 year old date palm seed found in Israel!

What is Sprouting?

Sprouting is the practice of germinating seeds (usually herbs, grains, legumes, oil seeds, and nuts) to be eaten raw or cooked. In the right conditions of air, temperature, and moisture, most seeds will grow a little tail that that burns up the energy stored in the seed to break through whatever is in its way. The tail actually forms “false leaves” called cotyledons that reach for the sunlight and begin to photosynthesize the energy the plant needs to grow its true leaves and develop into a mature plant.

Why Sprout?

Home sprouting is the fastest, cheapest, easiest way to grow your own living and whole foods. Sprouting allows you to cultivate crops with a 3-5 day harvest time, rather than the months or years it takes with crops grown to maturity. When we consume plants at this stage of their life cycle we’re often getting the greatest concentration of nutritional value and over-all health benefits including but not limited to anti-aging, anti-inflammation, alkalization, anti-oxidation, increased amount of and bio-availability of vitamins and minerals (up to 500 times greater than unsprouted cooked seeds).

Ancient Chinese healers sprouted to prevent and cure disease. Sprouting was done by 18th century sailors to combat scurvy, and by soldiers stationed in remote locations during World War II to ensure a source of fresh food year-round. The military took interest in sprout research after the groundbreaking work of Clive McKay. In an article on sprouting in 1943, he stated:

Our daily paper would surprise us if it carried an ad: `Wanted, a vegetable that will grow in any climate, rivals meat in nutritional value, matures in three to five days, may be planted any day in the year, requires neither soil nor sunshine, rivals tomatoes in vitamin C, has no waste, can be cooked with as little fuel and as quickly as a pork chop.’

Homesteading Applications of Sprouts

Beyond simply growing sprouts to eat, there are many other urban and rural homesteading applications. I often grow more sprouts than can be eaten and end up tossing them in the worm compost bin where they’ll continue to grow so I can prick them out, pot them up, and plant them later. Recently I’ve been using excess sprouts to feed chickens and as living mulch/green manure for garden beds. Homesteading applications include but are not limited to:

-Sprouts as feed for livestock
-Legume sprouts as nitrogen fixing, soil improving, living mulch, and green manure
-Certain sprouts as edible micro-greens
-Sprouts grown to maturity for replanting and seed saving
-Sprout rinse water for compost tea
-Fermented sprouted grain drink known as rejuvelac
-Sprouts as educational tools for children

Sprouting for Parents and Kids

Sprouting is a great way to introduce children to the arts and sciences of botany, gardening, farming, permaculture design, etc. When they experience the magic and mystery of sprouts coming to life and becoming healthy nutritious food, they begin a life-long process of learning and develop a sense of appreciation for the miracle of all life on Earth.

Some Benefits for Parents include:

-Reduced cooking time
-By including sprouts in your existing recipes for your children’s food you’ll be confident that they’re getting vital nutrients that may be lacking otherwise (e.g. sprout fortified pasta, rice, potatoes, etc.)
-You’re providing an educational opportunity for them to learn how easy it is to grow food
-You’re getting help from your kids when you engage them in the sprouting process
-You’re establishing healthy eating habits
-You’re taking back the responsibility to provide clean, fresh, healthy food

Save Time, Energy, and Resources

Once you’ve acquired your sprout seed stock, they require virtually no effort to grow and harvest compared to gardening/farming. In this way it’s a great beginners’ approach to home food production. Sprouting doesn’t require:

-soil
-sunlight
-weeding
-fertilizer
-processing
-separation of edible from inedible parts
-pollination
-months or years to reach production

You can build a lot of confidence as a sprout farmer that you can then apply to your efforts to cultivate whatever land is available to you. Hopefully after great success growing organically in your sprout jars, you’ll continue to avoid toxic chemicals in your farming on land!

Reduced Fuel Use

Many sprouts can be eaten raw thus requiring no fuel usage to cook. While most legumes require cooking to be edible, because the sprouting process hydrates, softens, and changes the chemistry of the seed, they typically only require 10 minutes of boiling.

Buying Sprouting Seeds in Bulk

I suggest buying bulk organic seed stock by the 25-50 pound bag. Look for your local bulk supplier, cut out the middle-man, and start buying in bulk. Beyond the cost savings and overall efficiency, it will also train you to take responsibility for your family’s food security as you’ll always have emergency food supplies stored at home. You can easily follow the preparedness mantra “Eat What You Store and Store What You Eat!”

Bulk buying:

-Reduces excess packaging, as you’re not buying individually packed single serving containers
-Requires far less trips to the grocery store when you’re rotating and restocking your bulk supply
-Makes you realize how expensive, inefficient, and wasteful retail food purchasing can be

A few of my favorite jar sprout crops so far have been brown rice, quinoa, sunflower seeds, green peas, chickpeas, lentils, pepitas, and almonds.

Sprouting for Frugality

For every pound of seed stock purchased, the edible food volume increases to many times the original dry weight. By sprouting you increase the biomass of your food sometimes over 1000%. After putting a half-inch of dry lentils in the bottom of a jar, in 3-5 days the jar is full and over-grown, and if you harvest half, it will fill up again in another day or so. You’re truly getting more for less.

Sprouting Helps Stop Over-Eating

When you eat sprouts, you tend to naturally choose to eat smaller portions. The nutritional profile of sprout based meals is so rich that you reach a point of satiety faster, that is, your brain receives a wide array of nutrient information from the tongue and sends signals to end hunger sensations. By eating right, you eat less because your body doesn’t have to send impulses to keep you eating and eating in search of the proper nutrients.

Sprouting For Survival

Anywhere in the world, from the tallest skyscraper, to the deepest cave you can sprout seeds. Astronauts have even tried to sprout seeds in space but with poor results as they discovered that gravity is essential to their proper growth and sense of direction. Sprouting can be an ideal transitional fresh food production strategy for both “bugging in” (aka sheltering in place) and “bugging out” (aka evacuation).  I believe that sprouting can and will save many lives in emergencies/disasters when and where the need arises for people to increase the yields of limited food supplies. Ideally a portion of the food that’s given to disaster relief efforts, refugee camps, etc. should be sproutable.

Sprouting requires irrigation, though a modest amount compared to what would be required for growing crops to maturity, and with gray water systems and mechanical/biological water filtration/purification systems, the water used for sprouting need not be wasted. In situations of water scarcity that don’t allow for water recycling, sprout irrigation could be achieved by carefully misting the sprouts rather than flood irrigating them (i.e. rinsing). This would ensure that only the smallest amount of moisture needed for sprout growth would be used. Certain types of sprout seeds are better suited for this method than others, particularly the very small seeds of greens and oil seeds.

Storing Seeds in 5 Gallon Buckets

For home food storage I recommend the standard 5 gallon bucket food storage system. This requires a 5 gallon bucket, a mylar bag, oxygen absorber packets, and dry bulk food. Rather than storing white rice and pasta, by storing sproutables, you’re able to have a food source that can be cooked, sprouted, and in many cases planted as a garden crop. The expiration dates and germination rates will vary based on the type of seeds. Rotating the buckets is the best strategy to ensure that if at any point you need to rely on them for survival, you’re always working with a relatively fresh supply.

Buy purchasing large amounts of sproutable seed stock, you’re investing in your future health and providing a food insurance policy for your family and community. It makes good sense to buy and store as many bulk organic sprouting seeds as you can reasonably afford. A sensible strategy is to incrementally build up your supply as you can comfortably afford it. It helps to set goals to reach certain milestones of “days forward” of self-reliance. In other words, you can start with a goal of reaching one week’s worth of food security by adding up your family’s daily caloric needs, counting the calories of your stored seed stock, and dividing the total stored calories by the total number of daily family calories. This formula will give you your family’s “days forward of food self-reliance” figure. Then slowly work your way up to months, and even years.