Sprouts!
Wheatgrass!
Ann Wigmore!
Sprouting!
For healing from pain, my own experience is that blended greens grown fresh at home are the most critical element. We need to return to the food we ate for millions of years — the food made by our Creator.
We need to eat plants that have not traveled on trucks and airplanes. Sprouts in the store are a dead food. You know they’re dead because they won’t grow if you plant them.
When you eat food from your Sprouter, it’s still growing in the moment you eat it! You’re eating the very energy and balance of Life itself. I could never describe in words the beautiful new life that’s given me. And my relief to be free from pain.
EasyGreen Sprouter
I know of only one factory-made Automatic Sprouter that can try to match what my home-made one does (produce a big plate of greens fresh every day) so have used it in my comparisons. It’s sold under the brand names of EasyGreen, Mistaponic and Mist-A-Ponic – all made by the same company.
I know the factory-made sprouter well because I used it myself for a year. And sold it in that time.
See how my home-built Sprouter wins on every count!
| Our GoGreen Sprouter | EasyGreen Sprouter |
|---|---|
| Cheaper — you can build one with off-the-shelf parts anywhere in the world using my Free Plans, and Dan’s Mist Kit if you can’t find misting nozzles in your country. | Expensive to ship globally because the growing container exceeds the size limitations of US Postal Service. |
| Bigger — has Six 3×13-inch trays, or get the Large Gogreen with these six trays plus three 6×13-inch wheatgrass trays. Trays are 2-inches high which sunflower greens and wheatgrass prefer (both grow to height of 8-9 inches). | Five 3×12-inch trays. Each tray is only one-inch high. |
| Quiet as a sleeping baby — uses water pressure for the misting. Stand next to it and you won’t hear a whisper. Perfect for small homes and juice bars, restaurants, wherever you don’t want noise to disturb you. | Uses a noisy mist generator (works like a humidifier motor). I needed a separate room for this sprouter where I had to close the door at night. Noise stresses plants too, not just humans! |
| Grows tall, sweet, crisp greens, with white roots — Dan’s growing container is 9.5-inches high — sunflower grows to 8 inches tall, wheatgrass to 9 inches. Greens breathe freely. | Growing container is a cramped 5.5-inches high inside — must remove wheatgrass for last few days of growth, and water manually. |
| Grows wheatgrass along with greens, bean and grain sprouts — when you get the Large container — with three 6″x13″ wheatgrass trays and six 3″x13″ trays for baby greens and bean sprouts, all in one Sprouter. | When growing wheatgrass, there’s no space to grow greens or bean sprouts – one wheatgrass tray fills the entire sprouter. My customers and I had to buy additional sprouters for greens and beans (more noise, more cost). |
| Low maintenance — no water container to fill or clean (optional if you want it — see FAQs). Water-line is connected to a faucet or cold water pipe, you can go away for a week and come home to fresh living greens in your Sprouter. | High maintenance — must fill water container DAILY and clean it often because it quickly slimes up. EasyGreen claims it has self-cleaning “disinfecting” cycle but in fact this uses bleach (which makes the fish go blind) and you must remove your plant trays for hours. I did not enjoy the hassle of scrubbing out the water container, it’s so hard to reach into it. |
| No tray rotation — my Sprouter has mist nozzles interspersed on both sides creating a swirl of high-oxygen mist over your plants. You never have to rotate trays, they all receive equal misting. | Must turn each tray around daily, because the mist comes from only one side where water compartment is. The end facing the mist grows faster, so you have to turn every tray every day for the other end to face the mist. |
Missionary Paula of Sanford, FL, e-mailed me:“I’m thrilled with my sprouter! It’s lovely to have fresh, organic sprouts and wheat or barley grass daily to juice up with other veggies and to munch on as is. What a nifty, clever design! Way to go, Val! We recently went away for a long weekend and it was great having all those thriving sprouts waiting to be eaten :)” With the EasyGreen, you must stay at home every day to nurse it with water, no weekend breaks. In fact, if I came home from work too late at night, the water compartment had emptied and my greens wilted. | |
| Our GoGreen Sprouter | EasyGreen Sprouter |
|---|---|
| Uses locally-bought parts with free 800-# tech support by the companies who make the parts. Buy everything at Wal-Mart and the big hardware stores, or get a complete Mist Kit from Dan, or a ready-built Sprouter. No shopping! | Broken parts must be returned to factory for replacement, at your cost (while your sprouts rot). The mist generator broke down most often — I have e-mails from customers testifying to this! |
| Flexible for juice bars, restaurants, and health stores — you choose the size growing container and plant trays for your needs, e.g. depending on how many ounces of wheatgrass juice you want daily or weekly. For health stores or a sprout-supply business, you can grow sprouts and greens in the two-piece vented plastic containers for re-sale, instead of using trays. A customer in South Africa bought a few basic Mist Kits (with my Plans for Free), built her own Sprouters with local storage boxes and trays, and now supports her family supplying local stores with sprouts + greens. | No flexibility — both growing container and plant trays are fixed in size. The vented containers that sprouts are sold in, do not fit under EasyGreen’s low misting height — not to mention the noise of all the mist generators going off at once (depending on the number of sprouters used) and huge expense! |
| Adaptable for off-the-grid — rechargeable battery-operated parts are available in place of the electrical ones (same price). | Mist generator requires connection to an electrical outlet — for those off the grid, the manufacturer e-mailed me that they need a high-cost 150W inverter. |
| Available to anyone anywhere in the world — buy the bulky heavy parts in your country (the growing container and plant trays) and all the small light parts in local stores or as a Mist Kit from Dan. | Expensive for overseas customers because of the high cost of shipping the growing container, plus extra cost for 220v mist generator (USA uses 110v). |
| Add additional Sprouters whenever you want — at low cost. Use the same water-line for multiple Sprouters. | Additional sprouters are full price. |
Reader Feedback
Ivan in Bulgaria writes (all quotes are verbatim, I’ve not corrected spelling or grammar):
“You know, you’re absolutely right about Easygreen. I have two Easygreen microfarms in my bedroom. I have to turn them off every night because they make such a noise that I cannot sleep. And they get clogged very often, so I have to disassemble the machine every 2 weeks. In fact last time I had to BREAK the machine into parts and then re-glue them again in order to clean the lime stone deposit inside the mist generator.”
“And it is VERY expensive. In fact it costs $300 here, and by our standart the price is unaffordable. The average monthly salary in Bulgaria is $300 [Feb 2009]. I do not really understand how could a plastic box + a $3 timer, all MADE in CHINA, cost so much???”
“Many visiting friends like the taste of fresh sprouted seeds and want to have this machine. But, as I said, it EasyGreen is unaffordable so I plan to make your GoGreen sprouter for them.”
Philip in England reports:
“From 2 years of experience with having to clean the easygreen sprouter — i am sick of it. I hope to place an order for Dan’s large mist kit soon. It will be perfect to get this kit and have a faucet water fed sprouter. Unplug and put the whole box in the shower and give it a good spray and wipe down without trying to shove my huge hand through an ackward limescaled easygreen hole to clean inside.”
Actually Philip you don’t ever need to unplug my Sprouter and take it to your shower! Occasionally I use a jug of hot water to wipe down the inside of the growing container. It never gets the slime that EasyGreen gets. I also had that big hassle with EasyGreen, trying to get my hand into the water reservoir to clean it every week.
Why does the EasyGreen slime up inside? Because the water stands still in its reservoir. With my GoGreen Sprouter, there’s no reservoir, you just click it onto a faucet (built-in quick-connect fittings) and water sprays out of the mist nozzles, onto your plants and down a drain hole. The drain-tube you can lead into a sink, floor drain, garden or bucket (same as EasyGreen).
Dr WH in Malaysia writes:
“I have been experimenting with sprouting and, yes, I even bought the Easygreen unit. Your observations on the deficiencies of that unit are accurate as I had the same experience. You even dared to reveal them to the global public and remained unchallenged by Easygreen.”
He mentions, “I am a retiree with time on my hands, and I am contemplating to start a small business growing and selling sprouts.” My advice for a sprout biz — begin with two Basic or Large Mist Kits. Two Kits will build four Sprouters — see photos of Kits here.
As your business grows, you easily add more Sprouters to the same water-line.
High-Oxygen Misting
Both my GoGreen Sprouter and the EasyGreen use a high-oxygen misting technique.
My GoGreen Sprouter uses a few mist nozzles which are easy to unscrew and soak in nozzle cleaner once a month or quarterly, while a spare set of nozzles continues to mist your plants. Nozzles are cheap to replace over the years.
EasyGreen uses a baby humidifier motor for misting, noisy and expensive to replace.
EasyGreen claims: “Conventional sprouting methods supply plenty of water yet only provide air by natural displacement.” This refers to the round manual sprouters, where you pour water in yourself, not to my GoGreen Automatic Sprouter which moves the old air out every time it mists.
EasyGreen further claims: “Our mist generator provides timed doses of high volumes of fresh oxygenated air, oxygenating the water and cooling the seeds in one simple operation.” Truth is both my GoGreen Sprouter and EasyGreen mist the sprouts automatically at timed intervals.
Mist is “fresh oxygenated cooling air” — whether it comes from a humidifier or a mist nozzle — this is what all mist is, teeny droplets in high-oxygen air.
The mist could even come from a hand-spray, like the one we’d use to spray our face on a hot summer’s day, or to spray the ironing. But with sprouts it’s too much hassle to spray for three minutes every three hours by hand.
EasyGreen says their technology is patented but in fact misting or fogging with a timer has been around for decades in hydroponics. You may’ve noticed at your local produce store a line of nozzles or foggers above the greens, misting them at regular intervals.
Minerals in Sprouts
With my GoGreen Sprouter, to add liquid kelp or hydrogen peroxide, you can easily screw a $10 fertilizer unit into the water-line.
Same with an inline water filter — it’s available off-the-shelf. My Sprouter Plans give details.
FreshLife Sprouter
The other automatic sprouter, the FreshLife, has no long 3×12″ trays — so it’s totally unable to give you a fresh plate-full daily of living greens.
Plus FreshLife recyles its own dirty water, yeugh, full of low-level toxins like enzyme inhibitors. Such dirty water leads to bacterial growth on the sprouts.
FreshLife uses a noisy motor, and you must carry it to the kitchen or bathroom to clean out and re-fill daily with water — no going away for a weekend.
As for the non-automatic Sprouters, Carolyn of York, PA wrote:
“I sprouted for about a year using a plastic sprouter in shape of a house that began to leak in the 4-corners. Then I bought a 3-tray hanging sprouter that swang wildly & dumped water on the floor of my apt. The place I bought these 2 sprouters would not refund my money or give me credit.”
My Sprouter is so easy to assemble — and fun — especially when you and a friend build your Sprouters together!
Get my Free Plans – see for yourself 🙂
Discover More
- How Much Wheatgrass Juice?
- Deciding on Water Source & Hose
- Download Free Plans — to build an Automatic Sprouter — enjoy living greens in your kitchen
- Sprouting Links — see all info on Sprouting.
- Site Map — see the whole Feast 🙂