Preliminary Report on Multiple Harvests of Microgreens from Chickpea (Cicer arietinum) Seeds

Microgreens are edible baby plants with huge potential for leafy vegetable production and many consider this plant-based functional food as the new “Superfood”. Microgreens have many advantages over sprouts and they help to improve the nutritional value of our diet, with their high content of healthy compounds. During the microgreen cultivation, seeding is usually done as a broadcast or in rows and as the seeding density is difficult to recommend, most growers prefer to seed as thickly as possible to maximize production, but not too thickly because crowding encourages elongated stems which increases the risk of disease. Some growers have noticed the possibility of a “second harvest” of microgreens, just after the majority of tall-grown microgreens are carefully harvested from the substrate with very high density of seeds, leaving a certain percentage of ungerminated seeds and sprouts to develop further. The present study investigated the possibility of harvesting more than one microgreen crop from a set of chickpea seeds through the regeneration of shoots after the first and the successive cuts above the lowest nodal portion of the shoots. It also included a study on the growth characteristics of the microgreens after the successive harvests