Well, I don’t know about you but we have been having over 40 degree days here and the nights aren’t a lot better.  Like people from the Arab world, we are better to close the house up completely and stay inside where it’s cool than to open it up to the hot wind.  At least it is, if your house is designed to do that.  If not, then like most Australians, it’s switch on the air conditioner and use even more electricity.

I was also away for twelve days and in that time we had one shower of rain and a neighbour watered once.  Needless to say, although all my plants survived, they are taking a little bit of time to recover and produce, and the lettuce has completely gone to  seed. Even without this extreme heat, it is hard to grow lettuce or cabbages here in the hot months so….go the sprouts.

I use alfalfa, radish and mustard seed to sprout as a lettuce substitute and I use snow peas for both salads and stir fries. It takes a little more attention to grow sprouts successfully in the hot weather as any that don’t sprout are inclined to rot and smell pretty quickly, if you don’t sort them out early.

I use that little spouting system you see on the right which has a container on the bottom to catch water.  Usually, I lightly cover the bottom of one tray with the alfalfa mix and bottom of another with the snow peas then by the time the alafalfa mix is ready to use, the snow peas are too tall (as in the photo) to be confined in a middle tray any more.  The alfalfa takes about three days before use, but the snow peas take about two days longer. These will grow and thicken quite a bit in the next two days, whereas the alfalfa in the container will be stored in the fridge for use in sandwiches for the next couple of days and I can use the tray to start another lot, or I could have one going already. There are 4 trays.

The larger seeds like the snow peas or mung beans, I also like to soak for a couple of hours to overnight to give them a bit of a head start as well, but I find it is not necessary for the small seeds.

So why go to all this bother? There is an excellent article at :

http://www.care2.com/greenliving/10-reasons-to-eat-sprouts.html#ixzz2I6s3bvYn  which gives ten health reasons for eating sprouts but I have a few others.

• They ‘re great when you are travelling, especially in remote areas as you don’t need a fridge, just water every now and then.
• They look wonderful on a salad and take up less room than a lettuce .
• My mother, who is now 83 used to grow them when they lived out west as they offer fresh greens for a minimal cost and you can grow them all year round and store the seed for years.

I get my seed sent out from  http://www.livingapartment.com.au/Products/Seeds-for-Sprouting which seems to work out fairly reasonably.