Microgreens: the health-giving shoots explained

04.09.2023 - 14:33 / theunconventionalgardener.com / guest

Header image by Oleksandr Pidvalnyi from Pixabay

Carol Wagstaff, University of Reading

Many of us germinated cress seeds on a bit of wet tissue at primary school, giving us a first introduction to edible microgreens. Recent interest in more diverse ways of getting flavour and nutrition into the vegetable components of our diets has increased the focus on the potential these crops have to offer.

There are now a growing number of horticultural businesses operating at a significant commercial scale to deliver a wide variety of microgreens to the market. In most cases, sales are to the food service industry, rather than retail, meaning you are likely to find them in your sandwich or as garnish on a restaurant dish. Microgreens are simply the cotyledons, or seed leaves, that first emerge from a seed when it germinates. If the seedlings were left to mature they would eventually become full-sized leafy vegetable and herb crops.

These miniature leafy salad crops pack a lot of nutritionally beneficial and flavoursome goodies into a small space. Seedlings of plants such as beetroot, radish, rocket, basil and coriander come in many shades of red and green. They give a real zing to a dish with their distinctive flavours and contain biologically active compounds, such as glucosinolates and polyphenols, that are known to reduce the risk of some cancers and cardiovascular disease.

Recent research has shown that the “bioavailability”, that is, the ease with which the human body can access all the nutrients locked up in the plants we eat, is better in some microgreens than others. Red radish sprouts had higher bioavailability of polyphenols than red cabbage, broccoli and white mustard, even though the concentrations found in the radish were