How To Grow Red Garneth Amaranth Microgreens

What's going on guys, Kevin from epic gardening here... This is a tutorial on growing Amaranth Microgreens which is probably something that many of you haven't heard of, or if you have at least you haven't seen it grown in a Micro Green or even if you have seen that you probably haven't seen Red Garnet Amaranth grown as a Micro Green probably one of my favorite looking Microgreens taste is is quite mild it's it's not unpleasant at all it's just a mild flavor it's it's nothing like a Basil or a Mustard but looks striking entire plant is a violet sort of deep blood-red and it's um it's it's a bit more expensive.



You will need:

Container (I use 10×20 plant growing trays)
Potting soil (I use a 50/50 mix of organic potting soil and coconut coir)
Light (I use a 4′ T5 CFL grow light if growing indoors)
Seeds (I buy mine from Everwilde Farms)
Spray bottle




So let's go over what we need to get into this you're obviously going to need some seed I get mine as I've mentioned in many videos from ever wild seeds ever watt farms really good company really love not only their their selection but price and shipping and all that stuff so I get red garnet just because I like the way that it looks you're going to need some water you're going to need a little seed shaker and you're going to need some soil so there's my big old soil bucket I've gone over it in many videos I use a 50/50 mix of organic potting soil and coconut guar so I rehydrate a brick of coconut guar then I mix in the soil and the soil is nice and moist go ahead and fill up a container with it and Pat it level don't pad it too hard you don't want to compact the soil but you do want a surface that is as level as you can get it obviously it's it's not 100% uniform but we're not looking for perfection we're just looking for pretty dang close so what we'll do now is go ahead and shake these out trying to get it as uniform as possible as you can see that the amaranth seeds are actually really small some of the smaller seeds that I've personally planted so I like to use this just because it offers me a bit more control than using like a glass or my hands or something like that it's okay if you lose a little bit on some of the more expensive seeds it's you'd probably be a little upset if you lost these but amber it is it is actually not that cheap compared to let's say in the rule a radish or something like that but it's not super expensive there's there's much more expensive micro green seeds out there.



All right, we've got it nice and distributed we'll give it a good spray of water and next step before you basically ignore it for a few days aside from misting it here and there is to cover it up, I would use something like aluminum foil which I will cut and and place on top of this and then we'll move on to the next part of this tutorial, stay tuned all right we're checking in on our red garnet amaranth it's germinating let's get a closer look it's germinating but it's not ready to come out from under the dome and when I say dome what I mean is I put it in a 10 by 20 propagation tray like you can see here and then I just cover it with another one I have a couple other experiments going on in here as well which is why there's so much space well yeah it's not ready to come out it needs a few more days to get actual sprouts coming up as you can see there's some germination there's some roots popping out of the seed and starting to dig into the soil try to find some nutrition and water but there aren't any leaves coming out or Pattillo Dawn's or seed leaves so what we'll do is mist it once twice a day lightly and then we will continue to wait and I would expect to see some leaves popping out maybe day four again this is day two, stay tuned alright we're back.



This is two days a little bit over two days later on the red garnet amaranth you can see about an inch and a half of growth it's a bit tilted towards one side because I have it out here on this balcony and it's you know it can only be positioned in one direction Suns coming in this is west facing. It's not amazing but man look at that growth I mean that's an inch inch and a half and a little bit over 36 hours and you can see what what it'll look like as a final product over here really beautiful plant but one mistake that I made with this tray was I actually didn't let it under the blackout dome long enough.



It's this is a bit leggy but once it gets the Sun going it's going to thicken up there's wind out here get stronger and it's going to be really really cool-looking, we're going to check back in on this in two days and that'll probably be about time to harvest this bad boy, we'll see you back in two days here we are day 6 of red garnet amaranth growth has been absolutely incredible I've grown this in trays before the 10 by 20 trays because this is one of the microgreens that I sell and the first time I did it I didn't let it get leggy enough now usually when you're growing most seeds you're starting most seeds leg enus which is essentially the plant struggling to find light and reaching up further and further effectively growing a very very long stem and not putting out a lot of new leaves is usually not a good thing because that weakens the plants structure when you no wind comes along or rain comes along or something like that makes it too brittle but since we're growing to the microgreen stage it actually doesn't matter at all and in some cases is preferable because if you get it a bit leggy you actually have more room to to sacrifice some of the stem when you're cutting and what you want to do is actually sacrifice maybe a quarter inch of that stem first of all because people often don't want a lot of stem in their micro green they want it to be relatively short and beautiful they don't want a really long you know four inch stem and a bit of leaf at the top that's not very pretty and not very functional and the second reason is is because you want a really clean cut and it really clean harvest you you don't want to waste your time doing a lot of washing, as long as you don't have mold and as long as you don't have any debris in there you actually don't need to wash these at all and that saves a lot of time and it also saves shelf life.



I'm going to go ahead and give these a cut I've got a Victorinox paring knife that I like to use right here that just cuts it straight through now if I was if I was doing this in a tray. This is obviously a bit easier to manage because it's just a tiny little cup what I would be doing is sort of pulling pulling it back and coming in at an angle and slicing just like this and then taking the bunches off and harvesting that way just because we're in a container I can basically just flip it on its side like this and come down like this and just sort of chop and that's what I'm going to do and go ahead and move this a little bit and instead of coming straight here right at the right at the soil line I'm going to move it up about a quarter-inch and just slowly chop through and that is exactly what we're going to be looking for for the harvest and then once I get halfway through I'm going to go ahead and flip sides just to make sure that I have a nice even cut all the way through because the the stems will start to push towards one direction all right.


We're about halfway through maybe I'll do it from this angle important to use a super sharp knife here because otherwise you're going to be pulling roots out and with pulling roots out you're obviously going to get a lot of soil and debris keep on going this is one of my favorite looking microgreens by far easily one of the most beautiful ones you'll probably grow because you have that translucent pink purple violet type of color that just pops on the plate and they actually tastes pretty good too they're not they're not the most flavorful of micro green but they don't taste bad in any way they just sort of taste a kind of like a bit like a grown grain I guess I don't really know how else to put it so check that out I mean very simple harvest I left about maybe about a third of an inch half an inch of stem but that's fine because what we've got here is a really plentiful harvest now if you're growing in a tray you probably get somewhere around six to nine ounces depending on how long you grow but you can see there's really almost no debris whatsoever anything that you see down there is an amaranth sprout right and and what we see here is just beautiful beautiful greens check these out I mean these look amazing in a salad they spice a plate up really nicely and they taste great too.


Chefs love them I find that a lot of farmers market customers will will really be into them just for a look I mean there's nothing wrong with buying something that it's healthy for you and also looks amazing I think that that's part of the joy in cooking for me at Lee and I think that it is for the joint usual consuming cool-looking dishes is something that we all care about a little bit, that's all there really is to it these these guys typically take anywhere from eight to twelve days depending on how you want to grow them and and provide a pretty nice little harvest. If you guys like this video definitely go ahead and hit the subscribe button there's going to be more videos like this coming and I rely on you guys to tell me what you want to watch and what questions that you have about either microgreens hydroponics gardening in general permaculture stuff so definitely drop a comment in and let me know like and share this video with your friends and I can keep this stuff coming because I really enjoy doing these videos for you guys so thank you for watching get some red garnet amaranth seeds start growing them and happy gardening guys this has been Kevin from epic gardening take it easy