(NaturalNews)

It’s one of the top concerns of people everywhere — how do we grow our own food for superior nutrition and food sovereignty? How do we store anemergency food supply that can get us through a crisis when conventional food deliveries to grocery stores may be cut off?

One of the most powerful answers to all this is sprouting, and sprouting is no more complicated than having a ready supply ofsprouting seeds, then adding water and sprouting your own living nutrition for mere pennies a serving.

Three big reasons why people sprout

People sprout for three primary reasons:

Reason #1) Vegans and vegetarians sprout seeds to eat high-protein living foods which make up the bulk of their diets.

Reason #2) Surthrivalists sprout seeds to grow their own emergency foods indoors, using no soils and having a compact food storage benefit (seeds are really tiny, but they sprout into larger foods).

Reason #3) Smart consumers sprout seeds in order to save money on their grocery bill, as sprouted seeds provide high-density nutrition at a fraction of the cost of traditional superfoods.

Sprouting, in other words, is one of the few strategies used by vegans, vegetarians, survivalists, practical household moms and everybody else who wants to grow their own powerful nutrition for pennies a serving.

It’s almost a form of “micro-gardening” because you’re practicing small-scale agriculture right on your kitchen counter. Kinda fun, actually…

Why sprouts can keep you alive (and more…)

Sometimes people joke about those who eat a lot of sprouts (“It’s rabbit food!”), but the science behind sprouting is no joke. Scientifically speaking:

• Sprouts synthesize their own natural VITAMINS.

• Sprouts are high in blood-cleansing CHLOROPHYLL.

• When grown in the right water, sprouts absorb numerous MINERALS and convert them into organic, bioavailable forms for safe human consumption.

• Sprouts are LIVING food that provide enzymes and other supportive benefits to human health.

• Sprouts are HIGH PROTEIN foods that can also help maintain or even build muscle mass.

• Some types of sprouts contain ANTI-CANCER nutrients such as I3C, which are widely documented and also common in cruciferous vegetables.

The bottom line is that sprouts can give you living vitamins from plants — and this is something you can enjoy on a daily basis or during a food crisis, if that’s what you reserve it for.

How to sprout for (almost) FREE

I wouldn’t want to live on sprouts alone, but neither would I want to live without them! For me, they are part of my daily diet of superfood smoothies (avocado chocolate smoothies, for example), quinoa lentil soups and occasional sources of high-quality free-range meats (I’ve been eating more quality meats since working on a ranch in Texas).

Sprouting can be as easy as placing seeds in a nut milk bag (or a sprouting bag) and soaking them every few hours to maintain their moisture. This approach, of course, requires a lot of attention to keep the seeds moist but not overly moist to the point where they start to grow mold. But it’s the most affordable way to start sprouting.

Video teaches you how to sprout for nearly FREE

Check out this awesome video on NaturalNews.TV by Jamison, who shows you how to sprout for (nearly) free:
http://www.naturalnews.tv/v.asp?v=6…

Here’s also another interesting video from YogaBodyNaturals.com showing “soil-free wheatgrass sprouting”
http://www.naturalnews.tv/v.asp?v=8…

Automated sprouting

For those who want to automate countertop sprouting, there are a couple of machines on the market that maintain the proper sprout moisture for you. I’ve tried three sprouting devices over the last few years, and the best overall device that I found is called the EasyGreen Sprouter.

It’s a countertop unit that helps you growfive trays of sprouts (and you can put a different sprouting seed in each tray) simply, affordably and reliably. In essence, it controls the moisture for you and “waters” your sprouts on a repeating timer while maintaining the right humidity.

Using this machine on my countertop (you need to use it next to a sink because it has a small drain tube), I’ve been able to grow masses of sprouts for just pennies a serving: Broccoli sprouts (yeow!), mung bean sprouts (like in Chinese food), wheat grass sprouts (for juicing!), and my favorite, alfalfa sprouts. You can also grow radish sprouts, which are rather intense in their flavor but also contain strong medicine.

The EasyGreen Sprouter EQMV

The EQMV is the newest model of the EasyGreen Sprouter, which has become a mainstay among healthy living advocates. It comes with:

• The EasyGreen MikroFarm sprouting machine (18″ x 24″ x 7.5″)
• Mist generator
• Activation timer (for controlling the misting frequency)
• 5 Food-grade growing trays
• Owner’s manual CD

This is the unit I own and use (I plan to shoot a video about it soon, like my recent video on cactus fruit juicing.) It allows you to germinate, grow and harvest large quantities of sprouts in mere days, for just pennies a serving.

It sits on your kitchen counter and uses water and electricity. That’s it. And the water used to grow your sprouts is never recirculated back into your sprouts, meaning your sprouts are grown in FRESH water only (the used water drains into your sink). You can also add minerals to your sprout water if you wish for them to update additional minerals and transform them into plant-based organic minerals. This is, by far, the healthiest and most natural way to intake minerals — get them from plants!

The EasyGreen Sprouter is also stackable, so you can double or triple your sprout production in the same counter space.

We’ve got the EasyGreen Sprouter on sale right now at the NaturalNews Store, where it’s being offered at 10% off the normal price for a limited time. This is a great value on a solid countertop device that can significantly enhance your ability to grow nutrition and grow your own emergency food.

Click here to see the sale price in the NaturalNews Store.

Starting with nothing but seeds and water, you can have edible sprouts in 2-3 days, followed by a much larger harvest in 4-5 days, and you can rotate your trays to continually produce fresh sprouts each day thereafter. You can also produce extra sprouts then refrigerate them while you grow more! So you can “pre-sprout” a larger quantity.

If you’re in Europe, purchase through:
www.easygreeneurope.com

If you’re in Canada, call 888-772-6001 to find out where you can buy it in-country.

Sprouting hints and tips

It’s better to sprout in a cooler area because a cooler room inhibits any possibility of mold growth. You don’t want refrigeration temperatures, of course, but more like something in the high 60′s or low 70′s (F).

By the way, I’ve personally grown teff sprouts, then dried them in a countertop food drying machine after pouring applesauce over the top of the sprouts. This makes a crunchy apple sprout bar that’s an amazingemergency food. Yep, you can “play” with all this and create your own amazing sprouted foods or dried superfoods by using nothing more than a sprouting machine and a food dryer (like the Excalibur units).

In fact, I’m so excited about this that I recently purchased a Cabela’s food dehydrator to begin large-scale stored food production. Hopefully I’ll bring you some video reports on that in the weeks ahead!

When you get a sprouter, remember to stock up on spouting seeds. These are easy to store (refrigerate them if you have the space), and they provide what seems like a massive amount of sprouts from a relatively tiny amount of sprouting seeds. The effect is quite astonishing. And, believe me, for all you survivalists out there (like me), sprouts are far more nutritious than MREs!

I personally enjoy teff sprouts and alfalfa sprouts the most. For me, radish sprouts and broccoli sprouts are way too intense and sharp in their taste. I would only use them sparingly. Mung bean sprouts are great for stir-fry dishes, but of course at that point they are no longer raw and living.

Dr. Gabriel Cousens likes to sprout sunflower seeds at the Tree of Life Rejuvenation Center in Arizona. I’ve toured their facility and they have a fairly large sunflower seed sprouting operation (way beyond the scope of this single machine), but if you just want to sprout sunflower seeds for personal use or family use, this machine is absolutely perfect.

Oh, by the way, you can also sprout chia seeds in this machine, although I haven’t experimented with that very much yet.

Enjoy your sprouts! And remember, if you want to save 10% on the EasyGreen Sprouting machine, get it on sale at the NaturalNews Store...

Until recently, I thought we were organized with our food storage and rotation. I discovered that there is room for improvement!

We’ve been going through and packing all of our ‘stuff’ during the past month as we get ready to move to another area. We’re not on a schedule so we have been going through all of our accumulated stuff in a methodical way rather than throwing everything in boxes and shoving off.

We’ve managed to weed out alot of items that we really don’t use or need anymore and have donated or sold some of it. The big surprise though (other than the realization of how much we all accumulate over time) was finding stashes of food that we had forgotten about, which was well beyond expiration.

Many years ago we had slowly started to accumulate some extra food, because we live in earthquake country (although not for much longer…). We happen to live very near one of the big faults that they expect to let-loose… they keep on saying that the ‘big one’ will happen within 30 years, the same thing that they were saying when we moved here 14 years ago. One thing I know is, the clock is ticking.

Anyway, as beginners years ago, we bought lots of various foods and started storing them in various places. Some in bins, boxes, and shelves in the shed, some on shelves in the pantry, etc. One of the problems we discovered while recently packing is that we lost track of all that we had, and where it all was stored. We came across several bins and boxes of old food. Oops…

While we looked through the old foods, we discovered that the foods we bought those years ago were not the smartest purchases. We didn’t necessarily buy the foods that we normally eat. Not only that, but we bought too many of some items and we should’ve known that we wouldn’t eat that much of this or that. Nowadays we know the saying, “Store what you eat, and eat what you store”. As a general rule, you shouldn’t buy food that you don’t normally eat (there are exceptions).

I do believe that if all your food storage is visible, it will be a much less wasteful system than having foods stored in boxes and bins that you lose track of. Some people are better disciplined than others with maintaining lists, and may be perfectly fine with having foods tucked away here and there, but I’ll bet that most folks aren’t that disciplined, and need to ‘see’ what they have.

If you see what you have on the shelves, then you are less likely to buy too much of this or that, and are more likely to be able to rotate your foods such that you eat the oldest first and keep it going in order so nothing spoils over time.

So, hopefully some of you will learn from our own mistakes. Try not to hide away storage foods such that you may forget about it or forget exactly what you have and when you stored it or when it will expire (there are exceptions).