Finally, a successful harvest

Since arriving in Halifax late last August I have tried growing a variety of plants with the intention that they may eventually provide me with some type of edible content. For the most part, this has been a monumental failure. The plants that have grown haven't really provided that much edible content, and good number of plants have become infested with spider mites and thus had to be terminated. Consequently, after almost ten months of active growing I have harvested not much more than a few sprigs of thyme and a bean or two.

Given this backdrop of failure, I am quite pleased to let you know that tonight I was able to successfully use some bean sprouts that I have been growing for the past few days. Somehow I was able to turn 30 cents worth of mung bean seeds into enough bean sprouts for a stir-fry for all three of us.

While the bean sprouts don't exactly look like those that you might purchase in a store, I was generally satisfied with their flavour and texture (though they didn't have much of either). Given the relative ease with which I was able to grow these bean sprouts I am quite certain that I will have to give this another shot at some point in the future, though only when I know I will be interested in using a batch of bean sprouts.

While I was growing the sprouts I took a few photos. The first photo is of an early stage of the growing process. At this point the beans had been soaked overnight and then had the water drained.



Twice a day I rinsed the beans and returned them to my closet. Eventually I had to move the operation from an empty jam jar to a larger container as beans had overgrown the original apparatus.

After a few days the sprouts began to look like more traditional bean sprouts, though without the same uniformity that is so common with machine grown sprouts.



This final photo is of the sprouts just before they were added to the stir-fry. All-in-all, less time/labour costs, I think I saved about $1.20 by doing in myself instead of buying bean sprouts and managed to secure for myself an immense sense of personal satisfaction.