Growing Microgreens comes down to understanding sprouting. It’s the very initial stage of a plant’s life cycle. And I would like to show you how to manipulate a plant’s initial growth stage for high-quality fresh produces.
Step 1, rinse all your new trays. And soak the growing mat with water. You will use half of the grow mat per tray. So it would be best if you also cut them in half to fit each tray.
Step 2, Spread the mixed seeds using a shaker. You can measure the percentage of the shaker you used to grow an entire tray with the ideal density for each seed type. Since our goal is only harvesting the very young seedlings, we want to spread the seeds with generosity. As long as they are not lying on top of each other, it will be fine. The only thing to avoid is the seeds clumping together, and they will not grow in the case due to space and humidity competition, causing sprouting failure and causing molds. You can be 2X between too few seeds to too many. So just generally measuring it with eyes will be fine. I usually prefer to grow the same seeds per tray to have a consistent result. The different seeds could cause bad sprouting, and molds contaminate the batch.
Step 3, with the support of the proper growing medium, we can skip the seeds soaking and kicks up the production by filling the water to the height under the growing mat. If you are growing bigger seeds that you want to save the cost of the growing mat and place them directly on top of the net, that is also fine. Still, in that case, you want to pre-soak your seeds for a few hours and need to make sure the tray is filled with water precisely to the height that touches the seed but not flooding over. So that is why I prefer the growing mat, more tolerance towards error, and simpler operation. But if you are growing radish microgreens or cilantro that are large enough to not fall through the net, definitely give it a try.
Step 4, depending on whether you have a growing mat, you can choose to stack your trays with seeds you just prepared. The growing medium added the aeration when the trays are stacked, so it can be an excellent method to ensure early sprouts are rooting themself and not getting pushed up by each other. And use a paper towel and two long binder clips to the top of the tray. You can also choose not to stack them, lay every tray flat, and have the paper towel clamped down on top of the tray. The growing medium mat made hydro microgreen growing very tolerable. You can try different methods and decide what you like. The goal here is to maintain maximum humidity to ensure the sprouts don’t dry out before they all root themself into the growing mat or grow through the net while maintaining the necessary minimum air aeration to prevent anaerobic bacteria growth suffocating all the microgreens. The paper towel will block most of the light to ensure we train our microgreens to have lengthy crunchy stems. Now we are done with the planting section.
Step 5, setting up the growing area and elfsys. After mounting your light, around 50 cm above your increasing tray of the 40W LED. It does not have to be specific yet, and it should be based on how your growing area is set up. Simply mounting the light under the kitchen cabinet or a shelf will be great. The 40W LED will be sufficient for microgreen and leafy green vegetative growth. For growing microgreens, it’s more important to ensure the initial blackout period to stimulate the growth of the microgreen sprouts. Some cold-weather plants like some light to stimulate the spouting process, like lettuce, but the majority of the microgreens that taste great don’t need light yet. So you can place your tray in some warmer place if the seeds require warmer weather to sprout or use an optional heating mat if the weather is too cold still. The seeds will have a wide range of sprouting temperatures but indoors is generally sufficient to sprout.
Step 6, Take out the wifi power strip, login into Elfsys Growing Cloud, click “+” after loading the main dashboard, and “Setup new system” option at the bottom right. We will pick the DWC system type here (there is no microgreen setup interface yet, but it’s the simplest system, so use the DWC option here temporarily). Then plug in the wifi power strip to your home outlet, hold the power button for about 5 ~ 10 seconds until the indicator light starts blinking, click the tuya logo inside the Elfsys app, and go through the instruction to connect the wifi power strip to the cloud. (if the auto pop-up Bluetooth connection does not work, then try again using the EZ mode or other options inside the Tuya API, they have a few different SKUs for other wifi and wifi + BLE newer chip. Ensure you have a strong 2.4ghz wifi reception network, or you can bridge it wirelessly with an additional wifi router to extend the coverage of Elfsys controlled devices. ). Click next after the wifi power strip is showing on the Integration list.
Step 7, Click the menu icon at the bottom right, then “Add Device”. Now you are in your Device Inventory. Click the “+” icon and add a light, select the 1st socket on the power strip listed, use the Teest Device toggle at the bottom of the screen, and confirm the chosen socket has responded. Toggle it off before connecting the grow light accordingly (don’t hotwire any high wattage devices to be safe). Click next, filling in the name of the light and all the specs that come with the manual or on the sticker on the light. If your lights are chained together on a single power socket, like those T5 and T8 LED bars, check the option accordingly and tell us how many of these are chained together. These data will help us build a database for all the growing devices on the market. Or you can skip all for now since it only enables you to identify the light’s name with the current iteration. Elfsys adopt flexible design and operation in mind. Here you can compartment each grow light as independent systems to run a separate dashboard and growing template or sync them together and grow as a larger batch. Everything is virtually grouped in the cloud end and controlled through the wifi power strip. So if you are growing 4 trays together as a batch, add another light device to the second socket. Then click the add button next to the device added to attach them to your first smart microgreen growing system. Optionally, you can also add a fan here, which will help the second growth stage to improve aeration for condensed high output growth. After attaching all the devices to your system, click the check “✓” on the top right.
Step 8, click “+” button on the Containers Overview page, tell us the growing container water volume of the tray. You can also estimate it by filling the tray using a water bottle. The relevant refill schedule is still WIP, so it currently does not matter. We will add a manual notification in the growing template. Assume it’s a 1 pot container for each microgreen tray here. Now attach the light that is assigned to the tray container. If the light is shared, assign it to one of the trays. The flexible container feature is still WIP, so we will only allow all the trays added to the system to grow together. If you want to have independent control, add them to the different systems on the system level. We will allow containers to have independent dashboards in future iterations. Unselect “All containers are recirculating” after all containers/trays are added to the batch, click the check “✓” on the top right.
Step 9, review your system summary (the add picture feature is not supported yet). You are Done with setting up your first smart growing system! Now you can click “start growing”, all containers available in the system will be selected and grouped together running the same growing template, then click “Create Template”, give it a name such as “Microgreen mixed 1” or “Broccoli Microgreen v0.1”, select the variety “Generic,” (the plant library has not been structured yet, will be updated soon). In the “Stage Definition” tab, since we want a two-stage control, we will add the “SPOUT” stage and the “SEEDLING” stage. Then click the yellow edit pen symbol to the “SPOUT. ” set 7 days in “Estimated Duration”, Type in ” Microgreen reach to ideal length 2 ~ 4 inches, or 5 ~ 7 cm. Since we don’t need light in the black out stage, leave the device schedules to “None,” then click the “Tasks” tab, click “+” and set a notification on day 3 and day 7 to observe the tray and do water change if needed. By day 7, change water and add nutrients at 0.33ml per L for the three parts formula. Click back to the “Stage Definition” and click the “Finish” button.
Similarly, in the “SEEDLING” Stage, we will set the Lights to 12 hours of light exposure. If your intent is for the fastest harvest, you can choose “always on” and give a 24 hours light cycle to accelerate the hardening and harvest. A 12-hours light cycle will allow you to harvest in 2 ~ 3 days after the microgreen reaches the ideal length while maintaining longer shelf life and delaying the vegetative growth. Try to set the light schedule to utilize the local off-peak electricity discount and avoid peak hours. You will be able to change the schedule during the operation. The goal for the template is to provide a guideline for repeatable success and continuous improvement over batches of growing and tailor it to every plant and operational process. After defining both stages, save the template.
Step 10, select the template you just created and start growing.
To be aware, we are still working on phone notification alerts. Currently, all notifications only pop up within the app. This whole process will only need planting, one refill, and harvest. When they reach their harvest height, do your refill with the nutrient, and confirm the stage change in the app dashboard, it enters the second stage in your defined template. If the microgreens are not long enough or slow in growth, wait a few more days before confirming stage change. Do extra water change when it smells bad, but eventually, only one water change will be needed with this method. And you can keep them growing for over a month. You can reduce light exposure to slow down the growth and extend the shelf life.