Veggies You Can Grow Now to Eat Soon: Lettuce and Sprouts

Left: a mostly empty jar with sprout seeds that were just rinsed. Middle: a nearly full jar with sprout seeds that are a few days old, most are already sprouted. Right: a salad spinner full of grown sprouts, ready to eat.

Many people are starting to garden seeds now, things like tomatoes and peppers that need longer growing time. Unfortunately, it’ll be a few months yet until we get to taste all these veggies we’re growing.

Right now you can grow sprouts and lettuce, and enjoy those fresh homegrown flavours in as little as 4-5 days for sprouts, and 2 weeks for lettuce.

How to Grow Sprouts For Sandwiches

Sprouts are an easy and tasty sandwich or salad addition. You’ll need a jar with a screw lid, and you can use cheesecloth or mesh screening, or you can specific lids, probably from your local garden center, health food store, or Peavey Mart. 

When we ordered our seeds from T & T Seeds a few weeks ago, we also added a sprout mix called sandwich booster.

It has been AMAZING. 

It germinates super fast, within 24-48 hours, and then they are ready to eat in 5-7 days. You MUST rinse and drain them with fresh water at least twice per day because if you don’t you can get sick. 

We try to have two batches on the go so we don’t run out. We start the first jar, then once they’re all germinated (2-3 days) we’ll swap out the lid with tiny holes for the one with larger holes, and start a new batch in a fresh jar. 

How to Grow Lettuce on a Windowsill

Lettuce is not quite as quick as sprouts to grow, but it is still pretty fast. All you need is a sunny windowsill, lettuce seed, some soil, and a shallow container with a clear dome lid. A takeout container, a plastic bakery tray, or a rotisserie chicken container, anything with a tall plastic lid will work. Ideally, you should have a water catch tray to put underneath the container. 

You can grow all sorts of lettuce, and other things like spinach, arugula, and kale this way as well. Many seed companies that you can order from have mixes with a delightful assortment of different fresh greens in them. 

Get Planting

Poke, or melt, a few drainage holes in the bottom of your container. Depending on the size of your tray, you should have several evenly spaced across the bottom of the container. Then add an inch or two of potting soil to the bottom of your container. Use a chopstick, or your fingertip, to create a few shallow rows, the length of the container in the soil, and then sprinkle some lettuce seed into each row. Cover the rows lightly. 

Make a Gentle Watering Bottle

Next up is watering your seeds, but it needs to be done gently so they don’t wash away. The easiest way to do this is to make your own fine spray watering bottle from a pop bottle.

You’ll need one that still has its plastic lid. I like basic 500ml bottles because they’re easy to hold in one hand, and you can squeeze them. Heat up the tip of a safety pin, stickpin, or needle, and poke 7-8 holes in the lid of the pop bottle. Fill your clean bottle with water, and gently water your lettuce seeds. 

Put Your Seeds Near a South Window

Once your seeds are watered, set the lid onto the container. Don’t seal it tight shut, you do need some air circulation, and then set it as close to a sunny south-facing window as possible. Check your soil daily, you’ll want to keep it damp, which may mean sprinkling it with your gentle watering bottle a couple of times a day, but don’t keep it too wet.

Keep the lid on until your lettuce is about half an inch tall so it keeps the humidity in for the sprouting seeds. After you should remove the lid and keep it off. Lettuce doesn’t like to be very hot and it needs air circulation. Just make sure to keep up with watering so they don’t dry out. 

As soon as your lettuce is about 2 inches tall you can start to harvest it. If it's a cut-and-come-again variety you can snip off a handful with a scissor and toss them into your salad or sandwich. If you’ve planted a heading variety, you’ll want to carefully snap off each leaf as close to the base as possible, without damaging the stem.

Lettuce sprouts just poking up above soil. I planted these on Wednesday, and this is how big they were by Saturday.