Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I came from the old fashioned mason jar/cheese cloth method of sprouting. It works, but it was a little bit of work so I thought I'd try several of the plastic sprouting systems like this. I've sprouted everything in this. I mean EVERYTHING. I bought several of the large packs of seeds from amazon including mixes, and they've all grown magnificently. The secrets (if they're secret, the instructions are pretty good) is to use ~2-3 teaspoons of seeds, soak small seeds like alfalfa for at least 5 hours, preferably 8, and the larger seeds/beans for at least 8, preferably 12 hours in room temperature water. Place in the tray, rinse and stack them, and I stick a lumped up kitchen towel under one edge to tilt it and dump the water out of the bottom tray half an hour later. Twice a day I rinse each tray and let the water drain off, then restack rotating the trays each time I rinse, bottom to top. Keep the top loosely set on top. Not enough room for a fly to get in, but don't seal it either. This allows the system to breathe and prevents too much moisture build up. Maintain the grown in temps around 65-80 degrees. Too hot and they'll spoil, too cold and they won't sprout. In 3-5 days you'll have sprouts or they'll at least be well on their way. Rinse out any hulls and non sprouting seeds after a few days because they'll ferment and taste bitter. When they grow thickly together, you can dump the whole mass into your hand or upside down into a clean bowl and rinse a ton of them off, then put the mass back in the tray. Keep rinsing and washing off the hulls. If you see what looks like white mold on anything, its not mold, its micro roots. They'll 'disappear' when you rinse for the most part. When you get a decent amount of growth, you might try putting them where they'll get some indirect sunlight as that will cause them to green up a little, which improves the nutritional profile a bit. No direct sun, it'll get too hot. If they grow too fast, put them into a colander or other draining vessel and put them in the fridge loosely covered, the growing will slow dramatically but still rinse once a day, they'll keep a while. Other than that, just make sure you have clean hands and clean surfaces when handling everything, and when you're done with a tray wash it with a bottle brush or similar and use a toothpick to poke out any small seeds that lodge in the drainage holes, and give it a quick disinfect. I keep a bottle of 10 parts water to one part rubbing alcohol with a little drop of dish soap in it for cleaning my granite counters and sink and the trays all get a little spritz of that and a rinse. I tried the other popular 'jar' type plastic sprouter and that worked well also, but I preferred this models ability to grow four different smaller amounts of sprouts rather than one large load of a single type. The ability to 'stage' them so you're always starting new ones every 2-3 days also improves availability and variety.