Cilantro microgreens

Cilantro is the slowest crop in this directory and the lowest yielding. Johnny's measured 26 grams of seed per 1020 tray returning 6 ounces at first true leaf, at a trial average of 20 days. Broccoli returns nearly twice the weight in half the time.

That is not an argument against growing it. It is the argument for being clear-eyed about why you would: cilantro earns a tray on flavor alone, because nothing else in the directory tastes remotely like it. This page publishes the arithmetic rather than hiding it behind enthusiasm, and it is the first entry here where the honest verdict is that most people should grow something else.

What it is, and how to tell you grew it right

Cilantro microgreens are seedlings of Coriandrum sativum, the same plant sold as coriander when it goes to seed, cut above the medium at first true leaf. There is one species here and no cultivar confusion worth worrying about. What there is instead is a choice of seed form, which matters more on this crop than the cultivar does on most others, and which the next section covers.

A correct tray reads as tall, slender medium-green stems carrying long, narrow, strap-shaped cotyledons, with the first true leaves coming in scalloped. It will look visibly less even than a brassica tray, and that is not a failure. Cilantro emerges on a staggered schedule because the seed is a husked fruit that usually contains two seeds, so a stand with a spread of heights is what a correct tray looks like. At the medium you should see a dense root mat and a scattering of round tan husks. Nobody publishes a plant height or stem diameter for it, so anyone quoting you one is estimating.

It is confused with dill, and the true leaf settles it instantly. Cilantro's first true leaf is scalloped. Dill's is feathery. That is the whole test, and it is reliable. Do not try to identify either by smell before you cut, because both are aromatic and neither smells like itself at cotyledon stage.

What it tastes like, and what to do with it

Bright, citrusy and unmistakably cilantro. This is not a crop with a subtle herbal hint; it is the herb itself, in a smaller and more tender form. Johnny's positions it for Mexican, Asian and fusion dishes and for fish and seafood, which is exactly right. The one documented flavor lever is timing: taking the tray to day 17 to 21 for fuller, frillier true leaves gives you a little more flavor than cutting at day 13.

Use it where a small amount of bright herb needs to read clearly. It finishes fish and seafood, tacos, salsa verde, rice and grain bowls, pho and other Asian soups. Its slender stems and low bulk make it a flavor layer rather than a base, and it is the wrong crop when you need volume, in which case pea or sunflower does that job and cilantro will just get lost.

And then there is the part no other entry has to deal with. A meaningful share of people experience cilantro as soapy, and the microgreen form does not soften that at all. This is not fussiness. A genome-wide association study of 14,604 people of European ancestry, replicated in a further 11,851, found a variant near a cluster of olfactory receptor genes associated with detecting a soapy taste in cilantro, with OR6A2 the candidate receptor for the aldehydes involved. If your customer is in that group, no growing technique will help you, and offering them something else is better business than trying to convert them. What the study does not establish is what proportion of any particular market that is, so do not extrapolate a number from it.

Growing it: only what differs from the standard method

Everything general about trays, medium, light and watering is on the standard tray method for growing microgreens. Cilantro departs from it more than any brassica does, and every departure comes back to the same fact: the seed is a big husked fruit and the crop is slow.

Buy split seed, or accept a slower and less even tray. A coriander fruit normally holds two seeds inside a round husk. Split seed has been mechanically divided, and it emerges faster and more evenly than whole seed. This is the single most consequential purchasing decision on the crop and it is not a cultivar question at all.

Soak for 4 to 8 hours if you want faster, more even germination. The commercial method that documents this does not state a water temperature, so use potable room-temperature water rather than inventing a figure. It is optional rather than required, and no source establishes a safe upper limit, so treat long soaks as untested rather than as a technique.

Sow 20 to 26 grams, and level the medium first. Johnny's trial measured 26 g per 1020 at about one flat per ounce of seed. A commercial grower runs 20 to 25 g specifically to avoid the moisture-trapping clumps that are this crop's downfall. Level carefully, because large round fruits roll into low spots and clump there, and a clump is where the mold starts.

Cover the seed thinly, in two layers. The documented method is seed, then just enough coco coir or soil to hide it, lightly pressed and misted. The thin covering is a hull-management tool, not a depth requirement. Nobody publishes a numeric seed depth for cilantro, and burying it is not the answer.

Weight it heavily and expect about six days in the dark. Roughly 10 to 15 lb for about six days is the documented method, which is the heaviest and longest blackout in this directory. The weight is for strong even rooting and close seed-to-medium contact, not for stretching the crop. Take it off when seedlings visibly push up and small yellow cotyledons appear. Leaving cilantro dark past that point makes it leggy and prone to falling over, and a collapsed stand does not recover.

Keep it cool, and skip the heat mat. This is the one crop here that explicitly wants it cooler: the crop-specific guidance is that cilantro germinates better under 70°F and does not need a heat mat. That is a ceiling rather than a range, and nobody has published an actual cilantro germination range, so this page records the ceiling and refuses to invent the rest.

Give it more airflow than the schedule suggests it needs. The crop is in the tray for two to three times as long as a brassica, with husks holding moisture the whole time. Airflow is the main control, and no source gives a number for it.

What goes wrong with cilantro specifically

Mold is this crop's number one killer, and it is a scheduling problem rather than a hygiene problem. The reason is structural: a long crop cycle plus husked seed plus any clumping gives moisture somewhere to sit for three weeks. High humidity, low airflow and clumped seed are the recurring conditions. Everything below follows from that.

Before emergence: slow, patchy germination. Some fruits sit inert while others come up. The causes are whole seed rather than split, old seed, or uneven moisture. It is partly recoverable if the late seedlings still have room, but the tray finishes uneven either way.

During blackout: retained hulls and mold in the clumps. Wet, tightly packed seed pockets, or fuzzy growth around husks. Trapped moisture and restricted airflow. Small localized patches can be dealt with; a tray with spreading disease cannot.

At uncovering: lanky, falling stems. Stems lengthening without supporting themselves, from blackout held too long or light too far away. Move to light at the push-up signal. A badly collapsed stand will not regain a marketable shape.

After emergence: damping-off. Water-soaked or constricted tissue at the medium line, then collapse. Pythium and Rhizoctonia are the usual agents, and none of this is cilantro-specific except that the long cycle gives it more time to happen.

One diagnostic caution specific to this page. The mist test for root hairs against mold, which works on broccoli and radish, is not verified for cilantro by anything opened here, so this entry does not promote it. Judge by the accompanying signs instead: spreading wetness, rot at or below the medium line, missing seedlings, or collapsed stems mean disease. Fuzz on healthy roots with sound stems and no spread does not.

Hulls stay on, and it is a finishing job. The round husk can ride up on the young plant. It is edible and it is crunchy, and it is not what a customer wants to find. Split seed, an even two-layer sowing, and adequate germination moisture all reduce it. Nobody publishes a retention percentage, so budget cleanup time rather than expecting a number.

Late is a choice, not a failure. Moving from day 13 to day 17 to 21 gives more developed frilly leaves and stronger flavor. What nobody has measured is a point where the crop turns tough, bitter or unsaleable, so this page does not name a day when decline starts.

Nutrition, and what is actually established

USDA FoodData Central returns zero results in every data type for both "cilantro microgreens" and "coriander microgreens", searched 2026-08-08. There is no FDC record for this crop as a microgreen, and mature cilantro values are not a stand-in.

But cilantro has something no other entry in this directory has yet: a genuine, sourced, positive finding. Xiao and colleagues (2012) analyzed 25 commercially available microgreens for ascorbic acid, carotenoids, phylloquinone and tocopherols, measured on cotyledon leaves on a fresh-weight basis. Cilantro came out highest in ascorbic acid of all 25. That is a real result, from a peer-reviewed comparison, about this crop specifically.

It is worth being precise about what it is not. It is a ranking within one study of 25 species, not a milligrams-per-serving figure, and the study's overall ranges across all 25 species are not cilantro's values. There is also work showing coriander microgreens take up iodine in a dose-dependent way when grown in iodine-enriched nutrient solution, which demonstrates that composition responds to production method and is not a claim that ordinary cilantro microgreens are iodine-rich.

So the retail line that cilantro microgreens are high in vitamins A, C, K, calcium, iron and phosphorus is not supported, because no composition record for the crop exists to support it. The supportable claim is narrower, more specific and more interesting: in the one study that compared 25 microgreens head to head, this was the one with the most vitamin C.

Which seed to buy

Seed form is the decision, and it is unusual in being more important than the cultivar.

Split seed, sometimes sold as cracked, is coriander fruit mechanically divided so each piece carries one seed. It emerges faster and more evenly, and it reduces the retained-hull problem. Whole seed is the intact husked fruit holding two seeds. It works, and it is slower and less even, and every hull it brings is one you handle later. Monogerm describes seed selected to produce a single seedling. If you are growing cilantro commercially and buying whole seed, you are choosing a harder crop for no benefit anyone has documented.

Specify Coriandrum sativum sold for microgreens or food use, name the seed form, ask for the lot number and germination percentage with test date where the supplier publishes them, and require untreated and uncoated seed. Penn State is explicit about why: dyes, fungicides and insecticides applied to seed may be present in the young shoots, and the shoots are the product.

A bad lot on this crop looks like slow scattered emergence rather than an even canopy, which is exactly what whole seed and uneven moisture also look like. That ambiguity is the real cost: you get a mixed-age tray where some plants are ready and late seedlings are still occupying space, and you cannot easily tell whether to blame the seed, the sowing or yourself.

Is it worth growing?

For most people, no, and this is the first entry here where that is the honest answer.

The numbers are not close. Cilantro returns 6 oz from a tray in about 20 days. Broccoli returns 11.5 oz in 12.5 days from the same tray at less seed. On rack turnover, the currency that actually matters when your constraint is bench space, cilantro produces 0.30 oz per tray-day against radish's 1.21. It is a quarter of the crop per day of rack time, and it carries the highest mold risk in the directory while it sits there.

It is worth growing for exactly one reason, and it is a good one: nothing else tastes like it. No brassica substitutes for cilantro on a taco or beside a piece of fish. If a chef or a market customer asks for cilantro by name, the crop pays because they are not asking for greens, they are asking for that flavor, and you are the person who has it. That is the market grower on r/microgreens explaining why he carries cress: a few customers are looking forward to it, and that is why he has it.

So: grow it if you are selling flavor and presentation to people who requested it, and price it from the measured 6 oz rather than from optimism. Do not grow it as a first tray, because the failure modes are slow to appear and expensive to learn from. Do not grow it speculatively hoping it moves, because 20 days of bench space is a lot to gamble.

Its real competitor for the slot is not another herb but a fast brassica, and the brassica wins on every axis except the only one that matters here. Against dill, the other fine Apiaceae garnish, the choice is flavor and leaf shape rather than economics; dill is not a visual substitute and does not taste remotely the same.

A note on the numbers above

The provisional correction runs the same way as every other crop so far, 50 to 70 g down to a measured 26. What is different here is the yield: the old page said 6 to 10 oz and the measured figure is 6, so the bottom of the old range was right and the top of it was aspiration. On a crop this slow, the difference between 6 and 10 ounces is the difference between a tray that pays and one that does not.

Two fields are blank on purpose, and the temperature one is unusual. Nobody has measured how long a cilantro tray holds a good cut, so the harvest window is unpublished. And there is no published germination range for cilantro at all: the single crop-specific finding is a ceiling, that it does better under 70°F and wants no heat mat, and turning the generic 65 to 75°F microgreen guidance into a cilantro optimum would be manufacturing a number. The ceiling is the useful part anyway, because it makes cilantro the one crop here you should deliberately keep cool.

The ten-day claim deserves one more sentence. Every documented source puts this crop at 13 days at the absolute earliest and 16 to 25 as the normal band. A ten-day cilantro harvest is not a technique anyone has published, and the post making the claim was the widest-reaching cilantro content of the month.

All 61 crops, sortable, on the microgreen comparison.

The two columns disagree, and that disagreement is the most useful thing in this table. Ranked by seed cost, mizuna wins outright at about 25 oz per dollar and radish looks poor at 5.7. Corrected twice as the table grew: this sentence named broccoli at 14.5 when eleven crops were researched, arugula took it at 20.8, and mizuna took it on 2026-08-09. Ranked by rack time, radish wins at 1.21 oz per tray-day and broccoli drops to 0.92. Both are true. Radish is expensive in seed and cheap in time; broccoli is cheap in seed and slower to clear the bench. Which one you should grow depends entirely on whether your binding constraint is seed budget or bench space, and nobody in this category tells you that, because nobody has researched enough crops to the same standard to notice.

Cilantro is the one crop that loses on both columns, 5.4 oz per dollar and 0.30 oz per tray-day, and it is still worth growing for the reason above. Prices move, so the dollar column is dated rather than permanent. The rankings are the durable part.

Sources

• Johnny's Selected Seeds, cilantro microgreen seed - Coriandrum sativum, open-pollinated with no cultivar stated, 16 to 25 days, positioning for Mexican, Asian and fusion dishes and for fish and seafood, the generic 75°F then 60°F growing information, and the $19.25/lb price behind the cost calculation, listed 2026-08-08.
• Johnny's microgreens yield trial results (PDF) - cilantro at 26 g per 1020, 6 oz average yield, 20 days to first true leaf, about one flat per ounce of seed, and the rounding and variation caveats.
• Johnny's microgreens yield trial, method and discussion - the 2017 greenhouse method, first-true-leaf harvest standard, and the warning that one grower's yields are unlikely to translate to another system.
• On The Grow, how to grow cilantro microgreens - split against whole seed and their emergence difference, 20 to 25 g per 1020, the 4 to 8 hour soak, the two-layer thin covering, roughly 10 to 15 lb for about six days, the push-up and yellow-cotyledon removal signal, better germination under 70°F with no heat mat, day 13 against day 17 to 21, mold as the crop's number one killer, retained husks, twice-daily bottom watering in coco coir, 7 to 10 days refrigerated unwashed, and no second cut.
• Harris Seeds, microgreens - Leisure and Santo sold as named cilantro cultivars, with no microgreen performance comparison published.
• Penn State Extension, The ABCs of Microgreens - the 7 to 8 day figure for common brassicas that sets cilantro's slowness in context, checking lot number and germination test date, and why treated seed is unacceptable on a crop eaten as young shoots.
• Penn State Extension, a step-by-step guide for growing microgreens at home - the default sowing method cilantro departs from, the general 8 to 12 hour presoak for hard-shelled seed, and washing immediately before use because washing shortens shelf life.
• Virginia Tech Extension SPES-756 (PDF) - general microgreen production environment and airflow, and damping-off as the leading disease concern.
• SDSU Extension, growing microgreens at home - untreated seed requirements for a crop eaten raw.
• UC IPM, damping-off - Pythium and Rhizoctonia, pre- and post-emergence death, and symptoms at or below the medium line.
• Xiao et al., 2012, Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry - 25 commercially available microgreens analyzed for ascorbic acid, carotenoids, phylloquinone and tocopherols on cotyledon leaves, fresh-weight basis, with cilantro highest in ascorbic acid of the 25.
• Ciriello et al., 2023, iodine biofortification of microgreens - dose-dependent iodine enrichment of coriander and three other microgreen species at 4 and 8 µM, demonstrating that composition responds to production method.
• Eriksson et al., 2012, Flavor - a genome-wide association study of 14,604 participants replicated in 11,851 more, a variant near olfactory receptor genes associated with soapy-taste detection, and OR6A2 as the candidate receptor.
• USDA FoodData Central - searched 2026-08-08 for both cilantro microgreens and coriander microgreens, zero results in every data type.