Welcome to the weekly oh nènè microgreens update, where we talk about the latest information on our microgreens journey. We started experimenting with microgreens in March 2021 and found the process fascinating. As we discover the wonderful world of microgreens, we feel inclined to share with you our progress.
We have been swamped taking care of many aspects of our business, so we didn’t have a lot of time to write our weekly updates.
La Ruche Qui Dit Oui
We started selling our microgreens at La Ruche Qui Dit Oui, as some of you may know. It all started as an experiment for us, and now we are selling at four different places:
- La Ruche Woluwe-Saint-Lambert on Tuesdays from 17:00 until 18:30.
- La Ruche Schaerbeek on Wednesdays from 17:00 until 18:30.
- La Ruche Evere on Fridays from 17:00 until 19:00.
- La Ruche Auderghem on Saturdays from 11:00 until 12:30.
You can check our Sales Points page for more details.
The concept of La Ruche is simple, the clients buy directly from the farmers/producers, and then they pick up their groceries at the pick-up points. La Ruche keeps a bit over 20% of the final price, so we farmers can decide what price we want to put. We aren’t working with any other distributors at the moment. Still, it feels like this is an excellent way to get customers that are careful about where they do their groceries since La Ruche helps connect local farmers with consumers, and we like that!
Degustations at La Ruche
Since we are starting to sell our microgreens at La Ruche Qui Dit Oui, we thought it could be a good idea to offer microgreen degustations at the four Ruches where we distribute our greens. If anyone is interested in coming along and trying our plants, you are more than welcome to come along and have a taste while you collect your groceries or look at how it all works.
This Saturday, we started the degustation at La Ruche Auderghem with Radish China Rose microgreens. We put our table and the microgreens on the tray, and we harvested minutes before visitors would come to the Ruche.
We look forward to seeing more people tasting our microgreens in the following weeks at any of the four Ruches where we distribute.
Washing trays
Now that we have increased our production to satisfy the demand on the Ruches and our webshop, we have lots of trays to clean, especially after harvest on Saturdays. Unfortunately, the process is prolonged, and it takes a lot of time and effort to get everything clean.
We clean our trays in our garden with a rainwater hose, so we minimize our impact on water usage, and we then disinfect the trays with an H2O2 solution, so the whole process takes quite some time. We haven’t found a better way to clean all these trays now, but I am sure we will find a more efficient way to do so with time.
Rocket microgreens wilting
Since the change in temperature in our growing room, we’ve been experiencing lots of problems with our rocket microgreens. After many failed attempts at getting a decent tray of rocket microgreens, we may have found the two reasons for the wilt in our greens:
- The water is too cold for the roots.
- We were putting in too much water.
We read in a microgreen forum that other people were also experiencing problems with their rocket microgreens, and some suggested adjusting the amount of water when bottom watering the trays. We saw a considerable improvement after giving it a try and putting less water on our rocket microgreens since they are not wilting anymore. We will have to continue observing during the following days to see if they will stay healthy throughout their growth.
Adapting the timings
We’ve been experimenting a lot with the timings of our microgreens (germination, blackout, light) before harvesting to see what gives us the best results, so we have adjusted a bunch of timings to get to a more optimal point on when to harvest our microgreens.
For example, our Radish China Rose complete growth cycle was about 11 days, and we managed to reduce it to 8 days. We didn’t necessarily change anything in our process, but we did reduce the number of days the microgreens were under the light. We noticed that on day eight, they were looking fantastic already, so there wasn’t much point in waiting anymore. Also, as we increase our operations, we want to run our operations as smoothly as possible to our racks are not packed with trays for many days.
Optimizing the timings is a delicate operation that requires patience, but we are finding the sweet spot and riping the rewards of our patience.
Thank you for your time, and until next week!
