Every Seed Has a Biography
29 crops, 29 histories.
Nothing we grow arrived here by accident. Each of these plants carries a route — through Mesoamerica, West Africa, the Fertile Crescent, the Caribbean, the American South — and each page tells that route with its evidence graded, its debates named, and its sources listed.
Where the record is firm we say so. Where it is contested we say that too, rather than flattening it into a better story.
What a microgreen actually is
A seedling cut between roughly 7 and 21 days old, at the cotyledon or first-true-leaf stage. That window is the point of highest metabolic activity in a plant’s life — rapid cell division, peak enzyme activity, concentrated phytochemical synthesis — before the plant spends that early surplus on stems and roots. If a leaf is stored sunlight, this is that storage at its most concentrated. It is also why we say eat the sun and mean it literally.
Not a sprout
Sprouts are grown in water without light and eaten whole, root included, which carries a higher food-safety risk. Microgreens are grown in medium, under light, and cut above the root. Baby greens are older and less concentrated; herbs are grown to maturity.
Speed is a crop trait
Fast · 6–10 days
radish · mustard · sunflower
Medium · 9–11 days
broccoli · kale · cabbage · pea
Slow · 12–24 days
basil · cilantro · beet · amaranth
Cut it, don’t cook it
In brassicas like broccoli and radish, chewing or chopping is what brings glucoraphanin into contact with myrosinase, the enzyme that converts it to sulforaphane. Heat deactivates that enzyme, so raw is where the conversion happens. Refrigerated airtight, that potential holds for about 5 to 7 days.
The nutrient-density claim
Four to forty times — per gram, not per plate
The figure everyone quotes comes from a 2012 University of Maryland and USDA study in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, which measured 25 microgreen varieties for vitamins C, E, K and carotenoids against USDA data for the mature vegetables. It found 4 to 40 times more nutrients by weight.
By weight is the whole caveat, and it is the one the wellness industry drops. A 25-gram container of microgreens is not 25 times a serving of spinach; it is a small, dense addition to a plate. We would rather you trust the number than be impressed by it.
This is a single landmark study, not a body of clinical trials. We describe microgreens as nutrient-dense food. We make no medical claims, and we never will.
What the studies named
- Red cabbage: 6× the vitamin C and 69× the vitamin K of mature red cabbage (2012)
- Cilantro: the highest carotenoid concentration of all 25 varieties tested (2012)
- Amaranth: the highest vitamin K of the varieties tested (2012)
- Sunflower: the highest calcium of six crops measured, at 148.6 mg per 100 g fresh (2025)
- Broccoli: 10–100× the glucoraphanin of mature broccoli — though some studies put it nearer 15×, and we quote the range, not the headline
Microgreens
Harvested at the cotyledon or first-true-leaf stage, days from seed. 24
Amaranth
Amaranthus tricolor & kin
A genus that fed empires in Mesoamerica, greens pots across West and East Africa…
7 chapters · read the biography →
Collard
Brassica oleracea var. viridis
A non-heading cabbage from the Eastern Mediterranean whose cooking methods became…
7 chapters · read the biography →
Black-Eyed Pea
Vigna unguiculata
A West African cowpea, domesticated in the Lake Chad Basin some five thousand…
7 chapters · read the biography →
…and 23 more microgreens, then Gourmet mushrooms (blue oyster, lion’s mane) and The house blend. Open all 27 biographies →
Fourteen crops are now shown in real photographs from our own growing room, badged as such. Striped panels mean we do not yet hold a photograph of that crop. The concept images that once covered the gap are gone — twelve of them were shared across every crop, and one packaging shot stood in for eleven different greens — because an image that resembles a crop is still not that crop. The House Mix, being a blend rather than a species, shows its four component crops instead of one picture.