Dill microgreens

Two suppliers sell dill microgreen seed and they disagree about the crop by ten days. One estimates 12 to 15 days to harvest. The other says 16 to 25. Neither is lying and neither states the leaf stage clearly enough to reconcile them.

What settles it comes from outside the microgreen trade entirely. An indoor grower demonstrating dill from seed, with no stake in how fast a microgreen sells, reports that seedlings emerge in one to two weeks and that after two to three weeks the plants "reclaim their signature thread-like structure of leaves." That feathery leaf is the thing a chef is buying. If the product is dill that looks like dill, the longer figure is the one to plan on, and the short estimate is describing a cut before the crop becomes recognizable.

The rest of this page is a slow, delicate, cheap herb tray with one honest caveat about where its yield number comes from.

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

Dill microgreens are seedlings of Anethum graveolens, an annual Apiaceae herb, and this is a crop usually held to first true leaf rather than cut at cotyledons.

A correct tray is a low, fine-textured, medium green stand: slender pale green to green stems topped by feathery, finely divided first true leaves. Not broad, not scalloped, and not lobed. The canopy should be evenly distributed and upright enough to cut cleanly, with no collapsed, translucent or pinched stems at the medium line. Expect some dark seed hulls near the tips or on the medium on a younger tray.

Height is condition-dependent and worth not over-specifying: the general microgreen harvest range is half an inch to two inches, while a controlled study measured about 3.3 to 6.4 cm at 25 days under its own experimental systems, which is not a home-tray target.

The confusion is with cilantro, and there is a clean tell for once. Wait for the first true leaf. Dill's goes fine, feathery and thread-like. Cilantro's goes divided but scalloped and lobed, never threadlike. At cotyledon stage the two are not reliably separable, so do not make the call early.

What it tastes like, and what to do with it

Mild at this stage but unmistakably dill: sweet, citrusy, an aromatic pickle and fresh-herb note. One supplier calls it mild and another calls it mild and tangy, and both are describing the same thing, which is that youth softens the intensity without changing the identity.

Use it where a small volume of aroma sits on top of finished food: cured or roasted fish, deviled eggs or egg salad, potato salad and roasted potatoes, cucumber salads, creamy soups, pickled dishes. It contributes scent rather than bulk or crunch.

It is the wrong crop as the body of a salad, as a sandwich filler, or anywhere it will be cooked hard: the fronds are very fine and bruise easily. And the audience warning is unusually clear-cut. People who dislike the mature herb's pickle aroma are not going to enjoy this, because it does not become a neutral leafy green by being young. Sell it as a labeled garnish, not hidden in a mixed salad blend where somebody meets it by accident.

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. Dill's deltas are all consequences of being slow and fragile at the same time.

Expect to wait, and decide what you are waiting for. Twelve to fifteen days by one supplier's estimate, fifteen to twenty on a grower sheet, sixteen to twenty-five on the other supplier's page. That spread is mostly about harvest stage rather than disagreement about the plant. If you want the feathery leaf, plan for the long end.

Sow dry at about 10 g per 1020. No soak. A research protocol did hydro-prime dill seed for eight hours as an experimental treatment, found no statistically significant yield benefit, and was investigating selenium biofortification rather than making a growing recommendation. Do not read it as a technique.

Three to five days of weighted or covered blackout, with an empty tray and a weight in the crop-specific sheet's method. The job is seed-to-medium contact and humidity while a slow crop anchors, not stretching stems. Uncover when most seedlings are up and pressing against the cover.

Then the thing that actually loses dill trays: keeping it wet and still while you wait. This is the crop's characteristic failure and it is a consequence of its own slowness. A grower watching a patchy tray at day eight is tempted to keep it covered and damp for the stragglers, and a warm, humid, motionless canopy on a delicate herb is precisely how the crop is described as going to mold and damping-off. Even moisture, not saturation, and get air moving as soon as it is uncovered.

Bottom water once it is established. Overhead watering flattens and dirties fronds this fine, and the canopy does not recover its look.

Keep it cooler after emergence. Warm and humid is a disease risk on this crop rather than a growth advantage, which is the opposite of the instinct a slow tray provokes.

What goes wrong with dill specifically

Slow, patchy emergence. Bare zones while a minority has sprouted, from uneven moisture, temperature, contact or a weak lot. Keep the medium evenly moist rather than saturated and check the actual temperature. Recoverable only while ungerminated seed is still viable.

Damping-off, during or just after emergence. Seedlings that never appear, root-tip rot, or water-soaked pinched stems at the medium. Pythium often begins at the root tips and wet conditions favour it. Reduce saturation, improve drainage and airflow, remove diseased material. A tray with widespread collapsed stems is not food.

Canopy mold or browning leaf tips under lights, specifically in hot, humid, low-airflow conditions. The crop's own grow notes name those conditions. Fix the air and the temperature immediately; visible spreading mold means discard rather than harvest.

An uneven, part-overmature tray. A mix of cotyledon-only seedlings and expanded feathered leaves, which is what slow uneven emergence produces at the other end. Cutting the advanced plants sacrifices uniformity; waiting for the laggards pushes the early ones past premium quality. There is no fix at harvest, only a better stand next time.

Nutrition, and what is actually established

There is no USDA record for dill microgreens, searched 2026-08-08. Mature dill entries are not a substitute.

There is real peer-reviewed work, and it needs reading carefully because most of it is about a treatment rather than the plant. A 2024 study grew dill microgreens in a greenhouse and in an indoor farm, harvested at 25 days, and measured yield, dry matter, height, potassium, magnesium, selenium, color, chlorophylls and carotenoids, phenolics, sugars, nitrate and Brix. For the unprimed controls, potassium was 61.85 mg per gram of dry weight in the greenhouse and 48.79 indoors, with magnesium at 4.65 and 7.15 respectively.

The selenium numbers in that paper are not a fact about dill. They were created by deliberately priming seed with 1.5 or 3 mg per liter of selenium, which raised selenium to 1.00 micrograms per gram dry weight in the greenhouse and 0.72 indoors. Anyone quoting dill microgreens as a selenium source is quoting a biofortification experiment, not a crop.

There is also a cross-reference worth having. The study behind the chervil entry assessed dill alongside it, and reported that 40 g of chervil or dill microgreens could meet the 60 mg adult vitamin C reference intake that paper cites. That is a composition result for those samples under those conditions, not a serving label, and it is the closest thing to a consumer-facing nutrition figure this crop has.

What is not supported: any "X times the vitamins of mature dill" claim, any US nutrition panel for dill microgreens, and any treatment of selenium-primed plants as ordinary ones.

Which seed to buy

Two offerings exist and neither has been compared against the other.

Dill (920M) is open-pollinated, described as finely textured, medium green and feathery with a mild dill flavor, at 16 to 25 days. Bouquet Dill is a named type, sold untreated, described as feathery with a mild tangy flavor, at an estimated 12 to 15 days with 4 to 5 days blackout. No trial has grown them side by side at equal density, medium, light and harvest stage, so the day difference between them is at least as likely to be a difference in what each supplier calls harvest as a difference in the seed.

And the sweep adds something the supplier survey missed: compact dill cultivars like Teddy and Thalia exist, chosen by growers in vertical systems because ordinary dill runs to a meter and a half. Nobody sells them as microgreen seed and nobody has tested whether they differ in a tray, but if you are experimenting, that is where an untested variable sits.

A bad lot is a real hazard here and it hides behind the crop's normal slowness. It shows as a low, patchy, asynchronous stand despite uniform sowing, contact, temperature and moisture, which is easy to blame on watering. One controlled study found dill had the lowest early germination of four herbal microgreens in its experiment, at 1 to 23 percent by day three depending on treatment, which shows how variable early establishment can be. Get the supplier's germination data and run a small logged test before committing several trays.

Is it worth growing?

Yes, for somebody with a dill customer, and only then.

Grow it if you sell to kitchens plating fish, eggs, potatoes, cucumber or pickles, or if you personally cook with dill often enough to use a tray. Its case is entirely flavor: it is cheap to sow at 52 cents, it is not difficult once you accept the pace, and micro dill is a thing chefs ask for by name.

Do not make it a first tray. It is slow, it emerges unevenly, its canopy is fragile, and it punishes exactly the instinct that slowness provokes. And do not grow it for volume: three to five ounces from a fortnight or more of bench is a garnish crop's return.

Its rivals are the other fine Apiaceae herbs. Cilantro wins whenever the buyer wants cilantro or the grower wants a documented benchmark, because it is the only crop in this family with real trial figures, at 26 g of seed and 6 oz. Fennel wins when the note wanted is anise. Dill wins when the dish needs dill, which is a narrow door and a real one.

A note on the numbers above

A caution about this crop's yield, and about chervil's. Dill's 3 to 5 oz comes from a grower production sheet. So does chervil's 3 to 5 oz, from the same document. The two crops are given different seed rates, 10 g against about 20 g, and different day counts, yet the identical yield range. That may simply be how both crops perform. It may also mean 3 to 5 oz is that operation's house figure for a fine herb tray rather than two independent measurements.

Nothing in the source settles which, so both entries keep the number and both now carry this warning. It matters because those two rows sit in the comparison table below looking like ordinary evidence, and they rest on one document that repeats itself. It is a good illustration of why this site records where a figure came from rather than only what it says.

Where it lands.

All 61 crops, sortable, on the microgreen comparison.

The Apiaceae bench is now almost fully written and the pattern holds exactly. Carrot at 0.10, dill at 0.23, cilantro at 0.30, chervil at 0.38, and celery unable to complete a row at all. Five fine aromatic herbs clustered at the bottom of the table, and only one of them, cilantro, has a figure from the trade's actual yield trial. Everything else in this family rests on grower sheets and area conversions. That is not a coincidence about our research; it is what the published record looks like for slow, low-mass, low-volume crops that nobody runs trials on because a trial costs the same whatever the tray returns.

Dill's saving grace on that table is the seed price. At 52 cents a tray it is one of the cheapest crops here, so 7.7 ounces per dollar of seed puts it mid-pack on value even while it sits near the bottom on bench turnover. For a home grower with a dill habit, cheap seed and a slow tray is a perfectly reasonable trade.

Sources

• Johnny's Selected Seeds, dill microgreen seed (920M) - open-pollinated Anethum graveolens, 16 to 25 days, finely textured medium green feathery leaves, mild dill flavor with sweet citrusy notes for fish, egg and potato dishes, 1/8 to 1/4 inch spacing, 75F soil then 60F with 65 to 75F ambient and the above-75F warning, 5 to 10 refrigerated days, wash before serving, and the $23.50/lb price behind the seed cost, listed 2026-08-08.
• Hoss, Bouquet Dill microgreens - untreated A. graveolens, an estimated 12 to 15 days with 4 to 5 days germination and 4 to 5 days blackout, feathery green leaves and a mild tangy flavor.
• Vitality Farms, micro grow notes (PDF) - the dill sheet: 10 g per 1020, 15 to 20 days, 3 to 5 oz, dry sowing, 3 to 4 days stacked under a 16 lb paver, the crop described as extremely delicate, hot and humid low-airflow conditions named as the route to mold and damping-off, bottom watering typically every other day, and packaging as dry as possible with 7 to 10 days claimed.
• Sheikhi et al., 2024, Frontiers in Plant Science (PDF) - dill microgreens in greenhouse and indoor farm harvested at 25 days in 130x70 mm boxes: unprimed yields of 599.82 and 1,173.2 g/m2, potassium at 61.85 and 48.79 mg/g dry weight, magnesium at 4.65 and 7.15, selenium raised to 1.00 and 0.72 micrograms/g only by 3 mg/L priming, an 8-hour hydro-prime showing no significant yield benefit, and dill lowest of four herbs at 1 to 23 percent germination by day three.
• KSU Agricultural and Natural Sciences study (PDF) - dill cotyledon harvest at 14 days and true-leaf harvest at 16 days after sowing at a mean 22C and 65 percent RH.
• Daisy Creek Farms, how to grow dill indoors from seed - seedlings emerging at one to two weeks and the plants reclaiming their signature thread-like leaf structure at two to three weeks, which corroborates the longer supplier timing.
• Johnny's slow-growing microgreens comparison chart (PDF) - dill classified with the slow-growing herbs at 16 to 25 days.
• Johnny's microgreens yield trial results (PDF) - the 29-variety chart that contains no dill line, and the cilantro benchmark used for comparison.
• Johnny's yield trial, method and discussion - 1020 flats with seed weighed before and after sowing, first-true-leaf harvest, and the warning that one grower's yields are unlikely to transfer perfectly.
• Virginia Tech Extension SPES-756 (PDF) - uncovering when a majority has germinated, the 50 to 70 percent humidity range with airflow, density and lot testing per facility and system, and harvest timing affecting yield, shelf life and quality.
• Alberta Agriculture, microgreens postharvest (PDF) - 4C or below with rapid cooling and clean shallow packaging, most species varying between 5 and 10 days, and no unnecessary delay between washing, drying and packaging.
• SDSU Extension, growing microgreens at home - pressing small seed rather than burying it, and the warning that seed treatments may be present in the young shoots.
• UC IPM, damping-off - Pythium and Rhizoctonia, rot at or below the soil line, and Pythium commonly starting at root tips.
• USDA FoodData Central - searched for dill microgreens on 2026-08-08, no record located.