Did you know you can use your chia seeds to grow salad greens super quickly on your kitchen windowsill? Make a little pot from a container, add some compost and sprinkle some seeds. Growing lots of salads and sprouts at home helps to reduce all those salad bags and sprout containers. Please share and add your ideas for simple salad greens.

To learn more about growing a permaculture garden simply and easily, check out our course The Incredible Edible Garden and learn how to design your own permaculture landscape in our Permaculture Design Course.

Hi! It’s Morag Gamble from our Permaculture Life and the Permaculture Education Institute, and welcome back it’s plastic free July. And every day I go live at around four o’clock, to talk about something you can do to help get rid of some of the single-use plastics. That kind of filled up our lives and looked at different ways that we can use our garden as well to make a difference for that.

So one of the things that often gets wrapped in plastic, are things like salads, and sprouts, and all that kind of stuff. So it’s so simple to get some things happening in your garden. And even if you don’t have a garden, I wanted to show you something. That you can do today, that’s so simple. That you can easily get fabulous, super nutritious greens within the space of a week. So many of you, I’m sure, know about chia. Now chia is this tiny little seed, and you can buy it in most stores now. So you probably even have some in your cupboard, great things to sprinkle on cereals, or to grind up into baking goods. Or you can add them into smoothies, or mix them with coconut milk. To make chia pods, all that kind of stuff is really fantastic protein. Now did you also know that you could plant them so you can plant them. And then very quickly they turn into sprouts really quickly, and then you can get little microgreens. You can just snip them off, and eat those as a salad green. Or you can let them come up a little bit bigger and just be plucking off the leaves. I often sprinkle them around the garden too, and then wait until they get really big. And then have the little, get the seeds off them as well. So I just wanted to show you a very quick thing. So even if you don’t have a garden, or you have even a tiny balcony and you’ve got a windowsill you can grow them. So I went sort of searching around bins down at the community, looking for some of these tetra pack type of things. So you can chop them down, put some soil inside, and then just sprinkle the seeds across the top quite thickly. It’s really good. I don’t know if you can see that, and then get a little bit of extra soil. Sprinkle that over the top to cover it over, there we go! Can’t see the seeds anymore, and then a little bit of water, to water that all in. So if you just give them water, maybe twice a day, depends if it’s in a sunny spot.

You might want to water them a little bit more, if it’s kind of just semi shade you don’t want to sort of drown them in that. So just use your common sense to how much you water them. Generally I sort of, if the water’s coming out the bottom that’s a good sign. So what I’ve done with this tub here, is I’ve actually put a hole. I don’t know if you can see, I’ll just get rid of that extra water. So you can see, there’s a little hole here to make sure that things don’t get flooded. You might want to actually have a tray that’s got a little bit bigger size than the one I’ve got here. And then, that can just be on your windowsill and literally within a few days. You’ll see them coming up, and then they’ll probably be this big within a week and you can be starting to harvest them if you want to actually spread these out into other pots. You can use this as your sort of your seed raising, then grab clumps of that, and then take that. And put them into different pots, and then they can get bigger and bigger. So you can do that, or just keep them small like this anyway. It’s a really simple idea, using something that’s kind of a waste product from and also chia seeds. Which are really easy to access, and you can just have that growing in and around your home. And also, helping to prevent your need to bring in plastics from having really good salad greens.

All right I hope that’s useful. Catch me again tomorrow, for another quick tip on how you can get rid of plastics this plastic-free July.