Hallo everyone,

I am rapidly increasing the amount of sprouted food in my diet,
and both my wife and I have found the benefits to be obvious.
I don't think we will ever go back. At this time we eat sprouts
every morning, and most evenings (my lunches are always undressed
steamed greens, and cooked grains, which are reasonably light).

I am about to post a series of articles, basically looking for
advice from more experienced users, and offering what I can
to the forum (which is not much).

This post is about equipment. I have three grooved plexiglass
trays, nestling on top of each other, with a small hole allowing
water to percolate down to the next tray and eventually into
a bowl. A tightly fitting lid maintain moisture inside.

This arrangement is great, and allows for growing three different
sprouts at once. The system is foolproof: discard the water
present in the bottom bowl, if any, pour 1/2 quart on the top
tray, do something else as water percolates down, wetting
everything. Repeat from one (cress) to three (adzuki) times a day.

With a bit of practice I found
that most seeds take either 3 or 5 days to sprout (5 days
are cress, mustard, adzuki, and alfalfa - everything
else is 3 days). I found also that some seeds (say, cress),
need little watering, and so need to go to the top tray.
Seeds like adzuki get dry fast, so they should go to
the bottom tray, and watered separately.

So far so good, but:
- I find that this arrangement promotes uneven sprouting.
  It is always best to start by leaving the seeds in water
  overnight, so they all get equally saturated. Comments?
- the trays are OK for appetizer salads and for breakfast
  bread-jam-sprouts, but if we were to go to heavier consumption
  they would be too small. What do the pros do/use?
  If you use the jar method, that might be a lot of jars and work
  (or do you just eat one kind of sprouts at a time?).
- so, basically, what do you use for your heavy duty sprouting?
- if we were to go to heavier consumption, things could get
  expensive real quick, unless we limited ourselves to green soy, adzuki
  and lentils (which we buy at the supermarket). Fancy seeds
  go at $3 per small package. What do the pros do?
  Mix spicier, costlier sprouts with bulkier, more nutritious, cheaper
  ones?
- how do you go about eliminating skins? I find it easy to remove
  alfalfa shells. It is reasonably easy to remove radish and soy
  shells, by swishing the sprouts in a big bowl of water.
  Everything else pretty much comes with a skin which
  can be unpleasantly jelly (mustard, or cress), hard (grains),
  or perhaps gas-giving (all pulses). What do you do?

G.B.