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.
Our microgreens are certified organic!
We recently got verified and certified organic by the organism of control from the region of Brussels. It all means that we are officially organic! We have been trying very hard for the last months to get the certification, and we finally obtained it. It was only possible to get the certificate from 2022, so it is very recent also for the microgreens industry in Europe. We wonder how it will be for more significant producers to make such a change since it was already quite complex.
What changed for oh nènè?
We had to change one thing in our growing process to comply with the organic European legislation since most of what we were doing before becoming organic was already aligned with the law.
The change we had to do was ditching the coconut coir as a medium to grow our microgreens. Now, as a medium, we are using plastic meshes. We will talk another time about the advantages and disadvantages of making such a change in our process.
Follow up with the sunflower experiments
Last week, we started an experiment to check how we could get good germination on our new sunflower seeds. The test was to soak the seeds for 12 hours before sowing them. We have used multiple times the soaking method to start our sunflower microgreens. However, this time, it didn’t work, and most of the seeds didn’t germinate.
Testing the soaking hours
Since our last experiment failed, we wanted to try something different and see if we could find the sweet spot for soaking sunflower seeds. We divided 100g of sunflower seeds into four other sowing times: eight hours, four hours, two hours and no soak.
We then sowed everything simultaneously and divided our seeds very clearly on the tray. Now, we are in the middle of the germination phase, and we do not see much difference at the moment. We will need to wait some more days to see which one germinates better.
Testing with cilantro seeds
This week, we also started a new experiment with whole cilantro seeds since we are very curious about the microgreen version of cilantro. We soaked our seeds for 12 hours, then sowed them as we do with all our seeds. Unfortunately, after four days inside the tray, they started moulding and none of them germinated. Yet again, another failed experiment.
We have read that it is better to do cilantro microgreens with split seeds, so we will try to split them and do another experiment, but that will be next week.
Thank you for your time, and until next week!
