Cal Hewitt

I grow microgreens, I write down what happens, and I show my sources. That is the whole job description.

Everything on this site comes from one of two places: a tray I actually grew, or something I looked up and cited. When I do not know something, the page says so. When a rule varies by state, the page names the agency and the date I checked it. You should not have to take my word for anything, and on this site you do not have to.

That includes the equipment reviews, and it is worth being blunt about them. They are built from what manufacturers publish, what they refuse to publish, extension guidance, and prices you can check yourself. They are not bench tests and they do not claim to be. Every one of them says "Researched only" at the top. I would rather tell you where the evidence stops than dress up a shopping trip as a trial.

What I have actually done here

Not adjectives. The work.

Those two numbers are different things and the difference matters. 61 varieties are written up. 19 of them are crops I have grown myself: radish, sunflower, pea, broccoli, basil, arugula, kale, amaranth, bulls blood beet, borage, buckwheat, cantaloupe, wheatgrass, alfalfa, cilantro, watercress, collard, magenta spreen, and catnip. That last one was for the cat. She has opinions.

The other 42 are researched rather than grown here, and each one tells you which it is by what it cites. Three of the nineteen, cantaloupe, magenta spreen and catnip, still sit at their original pages from the old site rather than in the rebuilt directory.

How I got here

I came to microgreens through a health scare. I needed my diet to change in a way that would actually stick, and microgreens were the thing I could grow on a shelf in my own home, year round, without a garden.

I bought them first. Then the price of buying them regularly pushed me into growing them. Then growing more than I could eat pushed me into selling them. Every stage taught me something the previous stage had let me get away with not knowing, which is why this site covers all of it rather than just the growing.

I sold commercially for a period. I am not selling right now, and I want to be straight about that rather than let an old page imply otherwise. I am taking a break from production and putting the time into research and writing instead, which is frankly where my background is more useful to you. I may go back to selling. If I do, it will say so here.

That gap is worth knowing about when you read the selling guides. I am not writing them while competing with you for a farmers market stall, and I am not writing them to sell you a course on a business I am currently running. I am writing them because the licensing question is genuinely hard to answer, I have been through it, and nobody else has done the work state by state.

Before any of that I spent more than twenty years as a business analyst. That background shows up in a specific place: when this site talks about money, it does the actual arithmetic. I have run the numbers on what electricity and water actually cost a small growing operation, because nobody selling a microgreens course wants to talk about the utility bill, and someone should.

What I got wrong

This is the part most sites leave out, so it is the part I want to be findable.

I have flooded trays and grown mold instead of greens. I have run lights too far from the canopy and harvested pale, leggy stems that tasted of nothing. I have bought equipment that looked right and worked badly. I have tried growing in used coffee grounds because the internet said to, and written up what actually happened rather than what was supposed to.

I spent a full year growing microgreens indoors and recorded the whole thing, including the parts that did not work. A grower who only publishes their wins is showing you a catalog, not a method.

How I review equipment, and what that does not mean

Nothing gets a recommendation here because a manufacturer sent it or because it sells well.

The reviews on this site are researched, not bench-tested, and every one of them says so at the top. What that means in practice: I read what each manufacturer publishes, I note what they will not publish, I check the claim against extension guidance and any measurement that actually exists, and I price the thing at sizes you can buy. Where somebody has run a real trial, I cite it and name them.

That produces a different kind of finding from a bench test, and on this category it is often a more useful one. The grow lights review is the example: seven fixtures, and not one publishes a light reading at tray height, which is the only number that decides whether your crop stretches. No amount of bench time on my part changes that, and knowing it saves you more money than my opinion of any single fixture would.

Four of the five reviews conclude that you should buy little or nothing. When a product is genuinely better for one use and worse for another, the review says both, because "best overall" is usually a lazy answer to a question nobody asked.

If and when gear does go on my bench for long enough to fail, those results will be labelled as mine, in the first person, and they will be separate from the research. Mixing the two is the exact thing this site exists to correct.

I use affiliate links, and I disclose them. They never decide a ranking, and I have reviewed suppliers I buy from myself and published what I did not like about them.

How I handle the legal side

The selling guides are the most consequential thing on this site. Someone reads a page here, decides they can sell at a farmers market, and puts their name on a food business. That deserves more care than a blog post usually gets.

So those pages follow rules I do not bend:

If you find something on this site that is out of date or wrong, tell me. That is free quality control and I would rather hear it from you than from someone who got fined.

What I am working on

Three guides, built from the same research that feeds this site. They exist because some of what I have learned does not fit a web page: it wants to be a thing you download, print, and take out to the bench with you.

Get in touch

I answer email. If you are stuck on a tray that keeps molding, if a state page does not match what your agriculture department told you, or if you want a variety covered that is not here yet, say so.

One email a week if you want it: what is growing, what the research says, and what changed in your state's rules. No filler.