How to Grow Microgreens Indoors

GardenDraft Team · July 30, 2026 · 5 min read

Part of: Garden Planning Guides

Growing microgreens indoors is the fastest harvest in all of gardening: seed to plate in one to three weeks, on a kitchen counter, in the dead of winter. They're just ordinary vegetables and herbs harvested as tiny seedlings, when they're packed with flavor and nutrition. No yard, no sun-drenched plot, no waiting for summer: a windowsill and a shallow tray are the whole operation.

What microgreens actually are

A microgreen is a vegetable harvested at the seedling stage: past a sprout, but cut young, usually when the first true leaves appear, at an inch or two tall. You eat the little stem and leaves. Almost anything works: radish, pea shoots, basil, broccoli, sunflower, kale, mustard, beet. (Skip the nightshade family, since tomato and pepper seedlings aren't safe to eat as greens.) Because you harvest so early, you sow the seed thick and never need to thin, fertilize, or worry about pests.

The simple indoor setup

You need almost nothing:

• A shallow tray an inch or two deep with a little drainage, filled with about an inch of moist seed-starting mix (or a soil-free pad).
• Seed, sown thickly across the surface, far denser than you'd ever plant in the garden, since they grow shoulder to shoulder, then pressed in and misted. A light cover for the first couple of days keeps them dark and damp to germinate.
• Light once they sprout. Uncover them at germination and give them a bright windowsill or a simple grow light. Strong light keeps them stocky rather than leggy.
• Water gently from the bottom to avoid matting and mold, keeping the mix moist but never soggy. The one thing that goes wrong is overwatering, which invites the same damping-off fungus that troubles regular seedlings.

Harvest, then start again

When the seedlings stand an inch or two tall with their first true leaves, snip them off at the soil line with scissors and eat them fresh. They don't store long, so cut what you'll use. Most microgreens are a one-cut crop: harvest the tray, compost the spent roots and mix, and start another. Because the cycle is so short, sowing a fresh tray every week gives you a continuous, year-round supply of fresh greens no matter the season outside — the closest thing to instant gratification the garden offers, and a perfect project for a dark winter or a small apartment.