| Tuesday, Sept 20, 2005: Success! Today I saw the first sign that my attempt to grow wheat grass is working - sprouts! There were no sprouts this morning so I was delightfully surprised upon returning home today to find that my wheatgrass had sprouted. I can't wait to see how it will grow into wheatgrass over the next week! I started them Sunday afternoon after soaking them overnight, so that's just two days it took to see that it's working - a good thing for my impatient self. |
| Saturday, Sept 24, 2005: The wheatgrass has grown quite a bit in the past few days. You'll notice a little bit is missing at the left end - My juicer arrived today and I couldn't resist! I was sort of expecting the juice to be bitter, but surprisingly it turned out to be quite sweet, kind of like the taste of sweet pea-pods. I have a feeling I'm going to be drinking a lot more of it in the future. |
| Monday, Sept 26, 2005: The wheatgrass now seems to be about 7 inches tall. They say it's at it's prime about 7 days after germinating, which would be tomorrow. I think I'm going to have some tonight though! |
| Well, sure enough I did have some wheatgrass juice tonight! Below shows the wheatgrass going into the juicer. This amount of wheatgrass yielded about 19 ml (5/8 oz) of juice. That might not seem like much, but it was quite powerful! It's not like eating ordinary grass though (which I did a few times when I was a kid). It's much sweeter, which is probably what makes it possible to drink it. Now I have a craving for some sweet peas in the pod! |
| Sunday, Oct 2, 2005: After two weeks of growing, the height of the wheatgrass seems to have leveled off, and the wheatgrass I cut is growing back! I guess I shouldn't be surprised - it is grass after all. However, the regrowth is uneven and from looking at it, my guess would be that it would produce far less juice the second time around. It looks like the law of diminishing returns is at work here. On the plus side, I've gotten better at extracting every last drop of juice from the wheatgrass, or perhaps it's just grown more, since my most recent shot was a 1.7 oz (50 ml). I started with | 2.5 oz (70 gm) of grass, which fit easily into a 6" cereal bowl, or could be crammed into a volume of 3/4 cup (though I don't think volume is a very reliable measurement here). Only 0.5 oz was left after juicing, so that means the juicer extracted about 80% of the grass as juice. I paid 28 cents for the seeds, and I'm juicing about 1/7th of the grass per day, so that's about 4 cents per (almost 2 oz) shot. Not too bad! (By the way, in case you were wondering, yes I do tend to analyse/quantify everything I do. I am a math grad student after all!) |
| Monday, Oct 3, 2005: Well, I poked online a bit to find out what the health benefits of wheagrass juice where, and found that there is a wealth of misinformation out there that might be contributing to it's popularity. Many extreme claims are made of wheatgrass juice, which seem unlikely to be true and lack research to back them up. Here are just of few of the questionable claims about wheatgrass juice I was able to find: |
| Claim: | But in fact: |
|---|---|
| The chlorophyll in wheatgrass rebuilds the bloodstream. | Chlorophyll cannot affect the human body internally because it is not absorbed. |
| Wheatgrass contains enzymes, which aid our body in digestion. | Enzymes are produced by living organisms specifically for their own use. Plant enzymes are not the same as the enzymes produced by the human body. Furthermore, orally ingested enzymes are broken down in the stomach. |
| A 2 oz shot of wheatgrass has the same amount of vitamins and minerals as 4 pounds of vegetables. | Which vitamins and minerals? Which vegetables? This statement is too vague to be meaningful. For example, a 2 oz shot of wheatgrass juice only contains 15 mg of Calcium, as compared to 89 mg in a half cup of broccoli. |
| Wheatgrass cures cancer. | No scientific study has ever confirmed this. |
| So as far as the known benefits of wheatgrass juice, it appears that it is not much different than any other fresh vegetable. It's good to know that at
least wheatgrass contains some vitamins and minerals, although not the ridiculously high amounts claimed. And who knows? Maybe it has some as
yet undiscovered health benefit. I expect I will continue growing it since it adds a nice kick and some extra sweetness to my vegetable juices. I'm now even more glad I didn't pay a ridiculous coffee shop price to try wheatgrass juice! |
 Tuesday, Oct 4, 2005: A note on vegetable juicers: For those who are interested, I obtained my vegetable juicer from
healthyjuicer.com for $45. Yes, it is a hand crank juicer, and yes it is possible to juice fruits and
vegetables with a hand crank juicer without having to be an olympic body builder. The key is to chop up the hard vegetables, such as carrots, before putting them
into the juicer. This can be | done the night before since the vegetables will still remain fresh until you juice them. You can make about 16 oz of juice before having to empty the collector. I have found that juicing allows me to drink more fruits and vegetables than I could eat in a day, but one should keep in mind that juicing is not a substitute for eating fresh fruits and vegetables. I try to make sure I'm still getting enough fiber, and use juicing only to supplement a diet that also contains whole fresh fruits and vegetables. |
| Sunday, Oct 9, 2005: This will likely be my last post on the wheatgrass page. A little reflection on my wheatgrass experiment yields two primary motivations for trying it: Health benefits and a desire to try something the "do-it-yourself" way. While the former turned out to be rather dubious, the latter has given me great satisfaction. The incredible ease with which I was able to grow wheatgrass has got me thinking about growing other kinds of food myself. While not every vegetable can probably be grown indoors, the thought of having such things as fresh buckwheat lettuce, cherry tomatoes, sweet peas, and fresh herbs growing in my house is enough to make my mouth water. And there is no question as to whether fresh fruits and vegetables are good for one's health. (By the way, I do not see health as the mere avoidance of | sickness. If one is only interested in their health when they are sick, it will do little to correct the cumulative effects of a lifetime of poor eating habits and a sedentary lifestyle. I started to become interested in my health after I daydreamed about what my life would be like twenty years from now, and realised that if my eating and exercise habits continued to be what they are now, the picture looked pretty grim.) Wheatgrass, or any single food for that matter, is not a magical cure-all. Nevertheless I would consider my wheatgrass experiment a sucess, and hope to have more sucesses in the future at growing food indoors. If you are trying out growing your own indoor foods, I wish you the best of luck, and I'd be interested in hearing about your experiences. You can email me at berglund@math.gatech.edu |
| About: The wheatgrass started as an idea from a friend who had seen wheatgrass juice being sold in a local coffee shop. Apparently wheatgrass juice is incredibly healthy for you (actually this is questionable, see October 3 post). Who knew? But the catch is it needs to be consumed within about a half hour since it starts breaking down almost immediately after you juice it, so the coffee shop had wheatgrass growing on a counter and juiced it right in front of you. The price however, was about what you might expect from a coffee shop - expensive. Not knowing of any coffee shops in the Atlanta area (where I | attend college) that sold wheatgrass juice, and not wanting to pay coffee shop prices to try wheatgrass juice, I figured why not grow my own? It might be more expensive at first (buying a planter and some dirt), but in the long term it will only cost pennies a shot. So if I turn out to like it I can save a lot of money over time. Having tried it I can say that I do like it, though it's flavor is quite intense so I think I may mix it in with other vegetable juices in the future. Because it is so sweet, perhaps it can be used to sweeten vegetable juices that are not naturally sweet. |