Footprint Three: Sprouting: One Small Step for Man

Over the decades, I have periodically dabbled with sprouts.  You must understand that whilst dabbling, there was no urgent need to increase one table spoon of sprouts into a salad to feed an army.  So the dabbling came and went in fits and starts.

Necessity, being the mother of invention, has changed the need.  Although not urgent, finding ways to make five fishes and five loaves feed me for the rest of time has taken on a certain appeal.

So sprouting is now back in fashion.  A few days ago, I dug out four empty Nescafe coffee bottles [those were the days, my friend, when Nescafe Gold made it effortlessly into the grocery trolley in armies].  I cut four squares of cheese cloth and made drainage lids for the jars, and then dug out some health seeds, some of which were designed expressly for sprouting, and some, as I discovered along the way, were not.

The four that first came to hand were, in alphabetical order:  Beet, Fenugreek, Linseed and Wheat.  So a healthy couple of tablespoons of each went each into their own jar and got soaked for a while which is how one starts sprouts.

Imagine my surprise when I went to drain them so that they could stand overnight, and I found that the linseeds were floating in a vast quantity of gooey, oily slime!  When I say vast quantity, all of the water in the jar had somehow been converted into something that belonged in a Sci Fi movie.  I could not drain the goo through the cheese cloth lid.  I persevered, and finally settled all four bottles back into their drainage basket, and then researched this Sci Fi phenomenon on the internet.

The results were not encouraging.  Half of the sprout proponents advocated linseed sprouts as very healthy.  The other half said, 'No, don't sprout!  Linseeds produce Cyanide'!  I have decided to persevere anyway.  If these poor little seeds, that are only the size of a pin head, manage to sprout in all of that goo, then they deserve to be savoured and enjoyed.

Two days have passed now.  All the other bottles are starting to germinate, and the handful of seeds at the bottom are starting to consume empty bottle space.  The linseeds remain stubbornly silent on the sprouting issue, although they remain prolific in the production of slime. 

                                                                              Fenugreek sprouts

I'll update this with the results of my linseed sprouting experiment, given that I am alive to tell the tale.