DIY Soil Sifter for Microgreens

What's going on guys. Kevin from Epic Gardening here doing a series on micro greens cause I'm starting a micro greens business here in San Diego. We're actually restarting something that I did a couple of years ago. So this is just a quick video. There's going to be some more structured stuff sort of following along the journey coming up in the next couple of weeks. But I wanted to just go over this little tool that I built for about 15, 20 bucks at Home Depot. So I initially built it as a soil sifter. So basically what it is is it's some simple plywood and some, some molding. So it'll fit on a 10 by 20 tray. So you can see sort of fits nicely around it. And then just some quarter inch wire mesh. Um, cut the mesh to size, nail it all together. It's pretty simple. And the reason I use the soil sifter is because this premium potting soil that I got right here, EB, GMB organics, uh, it's good stuff, except for that they do use some forest product, which means that you'll get some, uh, some twigs that are just a bit too large and it sort of disrupts sort of the surface area of the micro greens. Um, over here, I, you can't really see it cause this, this was some peas. These were some peas that I was growing, but you want a really smooth, um, fine grain uniform surface for the micros. And I just wasn't getting that with this. So I built this soil sifter and just dump it in. It's about two inches little, little taller than that. So basically you put the exact amount of soil that a tray will use in, shake it back and forth, sift it down and you get like really nice fine quality soil that's perfectly level. Um, and, and that's, that's another key thing. Cause you want, you want your soil exactly at this level or at least as close as possible because when you're harvesting, especially for low cut greens or low growing greens like a, like a basil, basil is only going to grow maybe like this high above before you're harvesting it. So, so if you need to kind of come down with a knife and come down in here, you're losing money basically, but you're also losing yield and yield translates to money of course. Um, so that's why I do that. Uh, it's a $20 tool that in, in, I don't know, three to five trays will pay for itself just in yield and time savings alone. Um, what you're looking at here is just some pea shoots that I sort of messed up. Um, just was running a couple of experiments on doing the peas a different way. And they're super leggy as you can tell. Uh, didn't get enough light and um, taste is medium, medium. Okay. Uh, but the, the, the secondary thing or secondary use for this, this soil sifter is it's actually a cool single tray drying rack for some of the, the micros that you're going to want to cut and wash. And I cut and wash these peas just because I wanted to give the drying rack a try. Um, so it's out here on the balcony. It's kind of sitting in the wind. Uh, these are all nice and dry now and so that that's going to drastically improve the shelf life of these greens. Uh, even just a little moisture makes the, makes them rot out pretty quickly. So, uh, that's a quick update. If you guys want to see more about the microgreen journey, building a local microgreens business, uh, either in San Diego or anywhere else, uh, hit, hit like, hit subscribe, and let me know in the comments because that's how I know if you guys want to keep seeing this stuff. So this has been Kevin from Epic Gardening, Epic Microgreens. Talk to you later. Keep growing.