Research-backed writing on microgreens, nutrient density and growing food at home, from the team building Luya X-1.
Everything we have published, arranged the way someone actually learns this — from what microgreens are, through growing them, to what the research supports.
What microgreens are, and how to get a first tray to work.
The evidence on nutrient density, and what it means at the plate.
Cooking, pairing and fitting greens into how you already eat.
The failures that end a growing habit, and their actual causes.
How controlled growing works, and what to compare before buying.
The same vertical farm measured 74 kg CO2-eq per kg on fossil power and 3.9 on renewables with waste-heat cooling. Nineteen-fold, from one variable — and food miles were not it.
One batch of radish seed, eight different soils, and a 3.6-fold spread in zinc. Lead and cadmium stayed negligible — but the study explains why a microgreen's mineral content is a property of what you grow it in, not of the crop.
Scallion microgreens give you clean onion flavour and a crunch that chives never have. They also reward a habit most home growers never adopt: sowing the same crop again before the first tray is finished.
Fenugreek takes three weeks and tastes bittersweet — closer to celery or lovage than to the curry spice its seeds are famous for. It is not a beginner's crop and it does not pretend to be.
Mizuna is a mustard that forgot to be harsh — sweet, fresh, faintly peppery, and cuttable in under a week. It is also one of the few crops you can harvest at three different stages.
Red clover germinates in a week and then takes three more to be worth cutting. It is a legume, it tastes nutty, and its texture is the reason to grow it.
Chervil tastes of anise and tarragon at once, and it is delicate enough that most people meet it without noticing. Sow it in rows — scattered, it grows into a tangle you cannot cut cleanly.
Dill microgreens smell like dill from the moment you cut them, and they belong on the same plate the mature herb does. One buying decision matters more than any growing tip: which variety's seed you pay for.
Microgreens are said to boost immunity everywhere you look. We went through the research to find the study behind it. There isn't one — and the way that claim gets built is worth seeing in full.
Broccoli microgreens have been fed to mice on high-fat diets, and the results were real. Here is what those studies measured, at what dose, and why that is not a diet plan.
Nasturtium seed is large enough to place by hand, needs no soaking, and produces round pale leaves with a nutty flavour and a peppery sting behind it. One sowing detail decides whether the tray comes up evenly.
Kohlrabi germinates in three to five days even in a cool room, tastes mildly sweet, and has more crunch than most brassicas. There is one deadline you should not miss.
Bronze fennel is slow — around three weeks — and it is the only microgreen that tastes of anise. It is also the prettiest thing you can put on a plate of fish.
Rainbow chard gives you red, yellow, orange, pink and white stems under dark green leaves, with a sweet beet-and-spinach flavour. Ready in about 12 days — and the seed has one requirement you cannot skip.
Cutting celery takes about four weeks — four times longer than radish. It is the only microgreen that tastes like celery, and for anyone who cooks soup that turns out to be worth the wait.
Amaranth, sorrel, basil and watercress seed is close to dust. Scattering it by hand gives you clumps and bald patches. Four techniques that fix it, none of which need equipment.
Sorrel is the only common microgreen that is genuinely sour. It is slow, the seed is expensive, and a small amount of it will do more for a dish than a whole tray of something else.
Most microgreen mixes taste like a vague green blur. A blend that actually works has three jobs in it — a base, an accent and an edge — and knowing which crop does which is the whole trick.
Bacteria get inside the plant during germination, where rinsing cannot reach them. That single fact rearranges every piece of microgreen safety advice you have read.
Microgreens have been recalled for Salmonella — most often broccoli microgreens. Here is the contamination record, why it happens, and what genuinely changes the risk.
Researchers digested Brassica microgreens in a lab and fed them to human gut bacteria. Different crops fed different microbes — and produced different short-chain fatty acids. Here is what that does and does not tell us.
A 2026 study found sunflower microgreen extracts inhibit alpha-amylase — the enzyme that turns starch into sugar. Here is what that result means, and the four steps between it and your dinner.
Broccoli, radish, sunflower or pea — which microgreens actually have evidence behind them for blood sugar? A crop-by-crop look at what has been measured, and what has not.
