Transcription
Welcome to the Micin Mastery podcast! I'm your host, Jonah Cmal. Together, we'll explore the art of turning tiny seeds into a thriving micin empire, sharing insights, coveted secrets, and strategic wisdom from building one of Canada's largest microgreens farms. Stay tuned for thought-provoking conversations with leading figures in the world of microgreens.
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In today's episode of the podcast, we are answering your questions from social media. Everything from tips to growing cilantro microgreens, the best soil and lights to use, ideal light schedules, the best way to sell microgreens when starting out, and so much more. Stay tuned; we have a great episode for you today.
The first question is: What do you recommend to use for disinfecting dirty trays?
So, the first thing with disinfection is you always want to get rid of the dirt first. Any soil residue, root residue, plant material— that all has to be removed as much as possible. I learned this the hard way. For many years, I would disinfect and then remove the dirt because it’s kind of like trying to do it all in one step. But the best and most effective way to actually disinfect and kill the bacteria and fungus on your trays is to get rid of the dirt, soil residue, and root residue first, then disinfect the trays. So that’s the first thing.
The second thing would be you want to use a disinfectant that ideally is not super harsh for the plants. A lot of people use bleach. It works; it’s a very strong disinfectant. But bleach is very toxic to plants, so if there is any residue on the trays after disinfecting with bleach, it may have a negative impact on the growth of plants. Generally, this won't be a problem, but if you're using a lot of bleach and there’s a lot of residue, that can be a problem.
The better option would be to use a product called Zerotol, which is a combination of hydrogen peroxide and vinegar. Now, hydrogen peroxide is a really great organic disinfectant that’s allowed for organic and non-organic production. It’s what a lot of farms use, and it’s very effective at killing bacteria and fungus extremely well.
So, the other thing is vinegar. Vinegar is also a great disinfectant; I would say hydrogen peroxide would be a better option. The best option is to use a product that has both in it, which is Zerotol. If you can't get a hold of that, rubbing alcohol is an option, but I generally wouldn't recommend that because it’s very pricey and it’s very toxic to breathe in all the time. So the least toxic, most effective is hydrogen peroxide and vinegar. If you can't get one or the other, then at least one is better than none.
The next question is: What are the best places to buy seeds?
So, this is a great question. In my experience, over 10 years of growing microgreens commercially, the three best seed companies would be:
Number one: Johnny’s Selected Seeds in Maine. They’re great because they have both organic and non-organic seeds, and they have really, really high-quality seeds. In my experience, you don’t want to cheap out on seed. I’ve made that mistake early on, and it often will cost a lot more than it will save you.
So, if for example, you have a seed, and it’s half the price, let’s say of a better quality seed, but you're getting really poor germination or really low yields, the seed is only a small cost of the total production. So buying good seed is really, really important. Johnny’s is always my number one because they sell both organic and non-organic, and on both ends, the quality is great.
Now, obviously, my farm was a certified organic farm, so we had to buy only organic seed. So, Mums is a great option; it’s really, really cost-effective. Even for non-organic growers, Mums is really great in a lot of ways. The only concern I have is there’s more inconsistency in the quality of seed, so sometimes you get a batch that’s great, and then the next time it'll be subpar quality. So, Mums has by far the best pricing in the industry, but quality can be hit or miss.
And then the last one, which I really love, is High Mowing Organic Seeds, which is in Vermont. They’re great; they only sell organic seed. Prices are really great for organic seed, and quality is top-notch. So, depending on what your market is and who you're targeting—if you're certified organic, if you're selling it as an organic product, but maybe not certified organic—maybe High Mowing or Mums might be a better option. If you’re looking for the best quality seed, Johnny’s and High Mowing would be the best options. If you’re looking to go down the route of lower-cost seed, Mums would be your best option.
Next question: What is the best way to sell microgreens starting out?
There's generally three main categories of customers: direct-to-consumer, retail stores, and restaurants. Those are the three main categories; there are obviously a lot of others, but those are where the majority of microgreens farms get their revenue from.
Now, starting out, I always, always, always recommend you do direct-to-consumer because it’s the least risky outlet, and it has the lowest barrier to entry.
So, if for example, you wanted to start out with retail stores, and you start selling your product—they want to buy it, and then you just started growing—you start running into growing issues. Let’s say you didn’t realize that in the summer months there's a difference compared to the winter months, and the crop doesn't taste as good or has disease issues, or you're not getting the yield you expected. That's going to damage the relationship with the grocery store because you won't be able to deliver what you promised.
Now, direct-to-consumer, that may still happen but the risk is much lower because there are so many consumers that are potential customers, whereas there’s a much more limited amount of retail stores or restaurants that you can target.
So going direct-to-consumer has the benefit of if you make mistakes, the risk is very low for the long-term success of the business. It's pretty high margin to start out, and it’s the lowest barrier to entry, so it’s the easiest customers to get. That’s what I always recommend for someone starting out: to go direct-to-consumer.
What is the most efficient way to sow seeds?
The most efficient way is to use automation, but I won't get into that. Just from using the least costly methods as a farm starting out, the best way to sow seeds would be to have some sort of accurate scale and then weigh out the seeds.
So if you want, you know, 10 grams for broccoli per tray, you would weigh out 10 grams and then sprinkle it evenly over the tray. Now, the best way to do this at a larger scale until you get some sort of automation in place would be to do things in groupings.
So you would weigh out the seeds. Let's say you have 100 trays of broccoli microgreens to grow this week; you would have 100 cups that you would buy, and then you'd weigh out 10 grams in each cup and then do all the sprinkling at once and then, you know, do all the watering at once.
That way, it’s much more efficient than doing one at a time. Grouping things together may not seem like it’s that big of a deal, but when you're doing hundreds of something at a time, fractions of a second or a few seconds difference will make a substantial difference in how long it takes you to do something.
So it's a good methodology to use when starting out with microgreens or when expanding your business. A lot of the tasks may seem like, "Oh, it doesn’t really make a difference if I do it this way or that way," but if you really actually time it and see, "Oh, this way is actually three seconds faster," you multiply three seconds by 100 trays—that's 300 seconds.
Then, you do that by a bunch of different tasks, and you can save many hours off your week by doing things more efficiently. So that’s what I recommend for sowing seeds, and take that methodology and apply it to other areas of your business.
Next question: What is the best soil and lights to use for growing microgreens?
For soil, what I generally recommend is two products, both made by ProMix. One is ProMix HP, which is the non-organic soil that I’d recommend, and then there’s ProMix HP, which is the organic version of ProMix HP. Now, both are really great soils, and the reason I recommend them is because they’re easily available.
If I would recommend a specific brand that I can get here, but you can't get it elsewhere, that doesn’t really help. So, while there may be specific products that would work better in your local area, as a general recommendation, ProMix HP and MP are really great soils that are easy to get and provide a lot of value per unit or per bag.
I get a lot of questions about brands like Happy Frog and other loose bag soils. The issue with these loose bag soils is that you’re paying a lot for shipping. With the ProMix HP and MP, they come compressed in a bail, so while it’s 3.8 cubic feet, which is 107 liters per bail, it almost doubles when you decompress it.
So, you’re actually getting twice the amount of soil that you would in a standard bag of soil, so it’s much more cost-effective.
Things like coconut coir, which come compressed in a brick, besides the quality issues with a lot of coconut coir having very high salt levels, which is very problematic for growing any plant, let alone microgreens—I think honestly the biggest issue is trying to scale with coconut coir.
A lot of people really like coconut; it’s a great growing medium in a lot of ways. It’s more sustainable than peat-based growing media, but the challenge is every time you need to have soil, you have to wet that brick of coconut coir quite a bit and break it up by hand.
It’s very, very time-consuming. I spent maybe six months using coconut coir in the early years and was like, "This is crazy; this is taking up way too much of my time." Whereas you can take a bail of ProMix HP or MP, and kind of just fluff it up, and it's ready to use. You don’t have to worry about salt issues or having imbalances in nutrients and things like that.
Now, for lights, the best lights I would recommend, again, come down to what is the best option for people that they can actually buy, you know, around the world or in North America, and that is the Bina 42 watt, 4-foot LED fixtures. You can get them on Amazon; they’re very, very cheap, and they’re really good quality for the price.
I’ve been using them just in a cabinet for bonsai for many years and haven’t had a single one burnout or have any sort of quality issues, and pretty much everyone I know that uses them feels the same way.
They’re not the strongest lights that you can get, but from a value perspective, they’re the best lights you can get in terms of output versus price. So the best value is the simple way to put it.
Generally speaking, I recommend the spectrum that gives off a purple hue rather than the white hue. A lot of people think of white lights as the way to go, and they are in some ways, if you’re growing cannabis or tomatoes. Plants can only use so much of that red and blue spectrum, which gives that purple hue to the lights.
But when you’re growing microgreens, you don’t actually need that much light, and the red and blue spectrums are much more efficient for the plant to absorb the light than the white spectrum, which is more the green and yellow.
So you can actually use less power and get the same output or use the same amount of power and actually get more plant-usable light. Therefore, your plants will grow faster, larger, and yield more. So if you have the option, if it's available, the ones that are purple-hued will give you better results.
For the Bina lights: Do you have any tips on growing cilantro so you get most of the seeds off and keep the microgreens clean? Yes, cilantro is definitely one of the trickier crops to grow. Getting the seeds off is definitely a challenge.
So there are a couple of things to consider. First is: Do you want to spend the time getting the seed hulls off? There are ways to minimize them, but when I sold cilantro microgreens, what we would do is sell it with the seed on because the seed of cilantro is actually just coriander, which is a common spice used in a lot of different cuisines.
So for me, I personally actually liked it with the seed hull on, because it gave a really nice additional flavor to the microgreens. But if you really do want to get them off, I would give two main recommendations.
The first is to get monogerm seeds. A cilantro seed is actually two seeds stuck together. So when the cilantro or coriander plant makes seeds, there are actually two seeds stuck together that make a circle.
There are a lot of seed companies, including Johnny’s, that will sell you something called monogerm seed, which is they split the seed in half, so that they’re half circles instead of a full circle and only have one seed per seed you lift up, if that makes sense. That helps the seed hulls come off a lot more easily.
So that’s the first thing. The second thing is to keep weight on the trays for longer than just the germination time. Generally, cilantro is about a 5-day germination period. Now, I would recommend keeping it for six, maximum seven days, with weight on it, and that’ll actually help a lot of the seed hulls pop off.
So that makes a big difference in actually getting the seed hulls off if you choose to go that route. But in my experience, most customers actually don’t mind. I’ve had in the 10 years that I’ve been growing cilantro microgreens, I think maybe a handful of customers ever said, “Hey, we don’t want the product with the seed hulls on,” or complained about that. So it's very, very rare, and yeah, I wouldn’t really worry about that.
Now, keeping the microgreens clean, the main thing to keep it clean is to make sure when you're harvesting that everything is dry. The drier your canopy of your crop is, the more likely anything stuck to the seed, so any soil or vermiculite stuck to the actual seed hull will fall off during harvest or before harvest.
So if you keep it dry in the canopy, it'll keep it a lot cleaner than if it's really moist because then, you know, moisture makes things stick. When things are dry, they kind of fall off, and that would be my advice for that.
Next: Do you have a single price sheet that you give to all clients, or do you have a different price sheet for different customers?
So this is a great question. I think it comes down to the industry. For direct-to-consumer, you want to have a standardized price for everyone. For selling directly to restaurants, you want to have a standardized price for everyone. For retail customers, you want to have a standard price for everyone, and if you're selling to distributors, you want to have a standard price for everyone.
Now, there are exceptions to this. You may want to do promotions on your product. For example, the first month a customer is on board with you, you give them a lower price as a promotion to get them to try the product. You can do things like, you know, buy one, get one free at the beginning, things like that.
But generally speaking, you want to have consistent pricing. The reason for this is you don’t want to run into the scenario where, let’s say you have two direct-to-consumer customers, and they happen to be friends, and they’re talking about that they’re both buying your microgreens. One of them is like, “Oh, I’m paying this price,” and the other one is “I’m paying this price,” and they’re like, “Wait, what? Why are you paying so much less than me? Why are you paying more than me?”
So it just kind of avoids that potential conflict. I wouldn’t say that’s a major concern, but it just keeps things simple to have a standardized price for each industry. Now, what you don’t want to do is have the same price for direct-to-consumer as for retail because you obviously need to sell at a lower price to sell into a grocery store to get it to be somewhat similar to the price that you're selling direct-to-consumer.
Because otherwise, the price point is going to be way off, and the same thing with restaurants and distributors. So you have to price it according to what the market demands and what makes sense, obviously for you as well. So different customers—different customer segments have different prices. Different customers within the same segment have the same price.
Next question: I'm using ProMix MP as my growing medium. That's a good start. Should I be putting vermiculite on all of my crops?
I talk about this a lot with consulting clients, where vermiculite is a really great way to fix a bunch of different problems growing microgreens, but it’s not always available everywhere. It’s a specific type of vermiculite, which is a fine vermiculite, more of a powder.
Some people that are familiar with vermiculite should know that it’s pretty much just an expanded rock. It’s a natural input that comes from rocks. They extract this material, heat it up, and it kind of pops up like popcorn. It has a really great water-holding capacity and has a lot of other great benefits for growing microgreens.
If you have it available, I highly recommend using it. It's a great tool to mitigate mold and to insulate your crops from drying out. Those are the two main benefits for vermiculite. For people running into mold issues on the seeds or the soil of your crops, vermiculite is a really great way to help reduce that significantly, if not eliminate it.
I haven’t dealt with mold on my microgreens in a very long time because I’ve been using vermiculite for many, many years. Now if you can get the fine vermiculite— which the brand that is most common in North America is called Thermal Rock—the grade of vermiculite that I recommend is 3A.
That’s a very fine vermiculite; that’s what you want. If you're using a chunky vermiculite, which is often used to add into soil, that won't really help with germination or the mold issues because it needs to cover the actual seeds, and a chunky vermiculite just really can’t do that.
So if you have access to a hydroponic store near you, you can call them up and say, “Hey, can you get a fine grade vermiculite?” In this case, Thermal Rock 3A, if possible. 3B is also good, and if they can get that, I definitely recommend using it. It’ll make your life a lot easier.
But you don't have to use it; it's not something that’s required to grow microgreens. It's just something that I find really helps make life a lot easier as a microgreens grower.
So the way I think of it is: The less you can worry about production, the more you can focus on sales, hiring, creating SOPs, automating—all the other things that will make your life easier. The goal is to minimize the amount of focus on production, if you can. Once you have a good system in place, of course; in the early days, you have to focus on production.
But as you scale up, the less time you can focus on production by creating good systems, using good products that are consistent—as an example, I mentioned earlier having good seed, and knowing that the seed will be good each time you use it is a huge time-saver.
So all those things, including vermiculite, are great ways to make production as smooth, easy, and less time-consuming as possible.
Do you keep all micro varieties under the same light schedule?
Yes! I think it just makes sense to keep things really simple: have an 18-hour on schedule and 6 hours off, and that just keeps things really simple. There might be a marginal benefit to increase for certain crops to 20, 22, or 24 hours, but if you’re using three lights per level, which I highly recommend, you’ll get really good results with 18 hours.
If you're using two lights or one light per level, then you’re probably not going to have as good results. A simple way to think about this is, let’s say you have one light per level, and you can get 20% higher yield with three lights per level.
If you're selling a tray for $20, and you’re getting 20% more light output or more crop yield, if you're getting 20% more yield, then you’re making $4 more per tray per week. So that’s, you know, over $200 a year to purchase lights that cost $50.
The return is, in three months, you make the money back, and for me, anything that is less than a one payback period 100% makes sense to do as a micro farm. If it’s one to three years, it probably makes sense to do, but it depends on a lot of different factors, like your financial situation and the growth trajectory.
If it’s three to five years, then it makes sense to wait till it’s within the one to three years to pull the trigger and purchase whatever that is to increase the efficiency of your farm.
I'm in an area where microgreens are not well known. Any advice to educate the community and gain customers?
Yes, this is a great question! There are lots of people that are in areas where microgreens aren't well known, and this is generally going to be more applicable to small towns in Canada and the US and other countries, where there's just not a grower in the area yet, and people aren't going to know what microgreens are.
So this gives you a unique advantage and a unique disadvantage. The unique advantage is you don’t have any competitors. Once you get a customer, you don’t need to worry about there being no one else there.
So you get that customer, and there’s no one else they can really buy microgreens from. The disadvantage is there’s more upfront work involved in educating them.
I think the best way to do this for direct-to-consumer, at least, is to use Facebook groups. There are tons of groups on so many different things. Even in a small geographic area, you can find anything health-related. Literally anything will work with every diet except for the carnivore diet.
So whether you’re vegan, vegetarian, keto, paleo—pretty much any diet, you can use a Facebook group to promote your microgreens, which is great. You can also focus on specific exercises: going to the gym, running, any sort of sports activity, yoga—any sort of groups, anything health-related. You can post your story, post that you’re selling microgreens, and share a link to the website.
That will drive traffic to people that may not know much about you, your farm, or what microgreens are. On your website, you can just have a very quick overview, like “microgreens are between four and 40 times more nutrient-dense than mature vegetables. They taste a lot better than mature vegetables and are easier to digest”—all the sorts of health benefits.
Then the best way from there is to offer some sort of free sample to people. It’s almost a surefire way to get people to sign up, because once they try the product, they’ve never heard of it, and then all of a sudden you’re expecting them to buy something they’ve never heard of.
So having that free sample really makes a huge difference. From that free sample, you get them on a subscription service and have a repeating customer week in and week out, which can last for several months. Sometimes, some customers last several years, and then you kind of repeat that process, and you should have tons of direct-to-consumer customers in no time.
Next question: A shop owner told me one light would work just as good as three. Could you please speak to that?
Yeah, so I kind of touched on this before, but if you just think about it: if let’s say you have 12 hours of light on per day and you increase it to 18 hours of light—same lights, you don’t even have to switch lights—you’re getting 50% more light to the plants than if you were growing with 12 hours.
Now it’s the same situation if you’re growing with one light and you’re growing another crop with three lights—you’re getting three times the amount of light on that crop, assuming the hours that your lights are on are the same.
Now, some people might be thinking, “Oh, maybe three lights is overkill,” and I can guarantee you it is not. Using one light, first of all, you’re not going to get an even spread over the tray, so you often find that in the center the greens will be shorter and on the edges they'll be longer. So that’s a first indication for sure that you don’t have enough light.
The tray should look completely even from left to right and from the top to the bottom, and if it doesn’t, that means you're not having even light levels. Secondly, one light is just simply not enough.
In my experience, I’ve grown a quarter million trays of microgreens, and I can say that growing with one light is just not even close to sufficient. Two lights, for some crops, you can get away with pea shoots or sunflower; you can get fairly similar yields.
But for pretty much everything else, you will benefit from having three lights per tray or per growing level. So pretty much three lights for four trays is the best way to go, and you'll have higher yields, better tasting product, better shelf life, and faster growing—so less days to maturity.
It’s just all around a big benefit to have three lights instead of one or two.
What humidity do you recommend for microgreens?
So generally speaking, between 40 and 60% will be totally fine for microgreens. I generally recommend it being closer to the 40%. Even if you got down to, you know, 30 or 35 in the winter, that’s totally okay.
The main thing is you don’t want it to be too high for two reasons. If you're growing in your home, you don’t want any sort of high humidity issues in your home, which generally speaking, unless you’re going at a really large scale, won't happen. Because of microgreens, it may already be humid in your house in the summer or if you're in a basement, for example.
The second reason is, if it’s in that lower range between like 35 to 45%, the canopy of the crop will be much drier, and you'll get a better shelf life on the product.
Now there’s a solution around this, which is to put fans on the crop. Putting fans on the crop will allow the canopy to dry out even if it’s higher humidity. But generally speaking, between 40 and 60% is ideal. Trying to keep it on the lower end of that range is always best if possible.
Anything above 60%, you’re going to start running into some issues with really wet, damp microgreens, which you want to avoid. So as much as you can keep it on the lower end.
The last question for today is: Going into the winter, my grow room gets several degrees colder than in the summer months. Will this be a problem for the microgreens?
It really depends on how cold you’re talking about and also if it’s Fahrenheit or Celsius. But even still, ideally, you want to have the same temperature year-round.
So if you’re growing, you know, 75 in the summer, you would want it to be roughly 75 in the winter. If it’s not, if it gets colder, it’s easy; you just add a heater.
You can buy a plug-in space heater, you know, at Home Depot or Walmart, plug that in, set the temperature to what you want it to be—that’ll solve that problem. That’s super easy! If for some reason, you don’t have access to adding heat, then I would try my best to add electrical in that space to add heat because it’s really going to make a big difference.
If it gets five to ten degrees colder, it’s really going to start slowing down your growth. The ideal temperature for microgreens, in my opinion, is 80°F or 26°C. Most people don’t keep their houses that hot, so I don’t recommend purposely increasing your whole house temperature. If you can increase the grow room, great! If not, you know, anywhere from 70 to 80 works totally fine.
If you start getting less than 70, it really starts slowing down the growth. So if you’re in your basement and it’s 65 in the winter and it was 75 in the summer, you’re going to see a multiple-day increase in the days to maturity. The yield may be lower, and things like that.
So it is definitely important to try to keep the temperature as consistent as possible. If for some reason you can’t, you may want to grow a few extra trays of each crop going into the colder months to make sure you have enough product for your customers.
So I hope that helps, and thanks so much for listening, everyone. Stay tuned for the next episode of the Micin Mastery podcast!
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