Wheatgrass

Wheatgrass is the odd one out in this directory, and it is worth being precise about how. It is the only crop here that is juiced rather than eaten. It takes 450 grams of seed per 1020 tray, nearly three times the heaviest sowing of anything else. And it is the only crop where nobody has ever published what a tray returns.

That last point deserves to sit on its own. Wheatgrass is absent from the one public per-variety yield trial, no extension source measures a tray, and the seller figures that circulate are calculators rather than measurements. So a grower loads the most seed of any crop on this site into a tray, and the honest answer to "how much will I get" is that it has not been established. The version of this page that stood before today said 12 to 20 ounces. That number came from nowhere.

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

Wheatgrass is the young shoot of common bread wheat, Triticum aestivum, grown densely in a tray and cut as grass blades for juicing. One clarification first: in agronomy "wheatgrass" also names perennial forage species such as intermediate and tall wheatgrass, which are different plants entirely. The tray crop is wheat.

A correct tray is a dense, dark green stand of narrow, parallel-veined blades, 3 to 6 inches tall, each tapering to a point and rising from a cereal kernel. There are no cotyledons, no broad leaves and no pale stem band, because this is a grass rather than a seedling with seed leaves. The top of the stand is naturally uneven rather than flat. At the medium you will find the thick kernel and root mat, plus the occasional seed coat that has stayed on.

Almost nothing in this directory looks like it. The one thing it is confused with is cat grass, which is frequently the same plant sold for a different purpose.

What it tastes like, and what to do with it

Mildly sweet with a pleasant bitterness and an unmistakably grassy finish. Johnny's phrasing is fresh, pleasantly bitter and mildly sweet, which is fair. It is a juice flavor rather than a salad one.

It is juiced, and that is not a stylistic preference. The blades are fibrous and are not digestible whole, which is why this is the only crop in this directory whose "eaten as" field says juiced rather than raw. It goes into a shot or a blended drink where extraction handles the texture, and it takes well to apple, pear or grape when the grassiness needs softening.

It is the wrong choice for a salad, a sandwich, or any garnish meant to be chewed. And plenty of people simply do not like it: one growing guide says outright that many find it unappealing on its own, which is an unusually honest thing for a growing guide to say and worth repeating to anyone about to plant a tray on enthusiasm.

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. Wheatgrass departs from it in three ways, all of them consequences of sowing cereal kernels at density.

Soak 4 to 8 hours, and do not go past eight. Johnny's specifies 8 hours and says not to reuse the water. A second source gives 4 to 8 with an optional 12 to 24 hour pre-sprout in mesh, and warns explicitly against soaking beyond 8. No source states a water temperature, so use potable cool or room-temperature water rather than inventing one. Under-soaking gives less synchronous germination; over-soaking, on a crop already prone to a sour mat, is asking for trouble.

Sow 450 grams, which is the heaviest rate on this site by a wide margin. For scale, the heaviest sunflower protocol is 167 g and broccoli is 13. That figure is a supplier's starting point rather than a trial result, and it is for a dense juice-grass tray. Reduce it if shoots are staying wet or crowded, or if you are growing on longer, because a thinner stand has better airflow and depletes water more slowly.

Cover for 2 to 3 days, lightly. Johnny's says to remove the inverted tray when germinating kernels lift it about an inch. The cover is for darkness and moisture during germination. Notably, no source instructs you to add a heavy weight to wheatgrass, unlike sunflower or cilantro, and adding one increases the consequences of an over-wet mat rather than improving the crop.

Then bottom water, and mean it. This is where the crop is won or lost. Broadcast onto an inch to an inch and a half of levelled medium, press lightly for contact, do not bury. After establishment, water from below so the kernels and foliage are not repeatedly wetted. Keep it under 75°F, with the general 60 to 70°F production range as the target, and keep air moving.

What goes wrong with wheatgrass specifically

Everything on this crop comes back to a wet kernel mat. It is sown denser than anything else here from large soaked seed, and the failure modes follow from that single fact.

Poor or patchy emergence. Old or low-vigor seed, an incomplete soak, uneven contact, or uneven moisture. The sign is missing or uneven rows by day two or three. Test the lot rather than reseeding into a standing tray.

Waterlogged kernel rot and damping-off. Persistent wetness plus poor airflow. The sign is collapsed shoots or brown, soft tissue at or below the medium line, which is different from healthy white roots. Pythium often begins at the root tips and Rhizoctonia is also involved. Once seedlings are collapsing, discard rather than harvest.

Surface mold across the kernels. Warm, wet and dense. Fuzzy gray or white growth spreading across the kernels and medium. A genuinely isolated spot can be removed if the rest of the tray is sound, but widespread mold on a food crop is a discard.

Yellowing and overmaturity. Loss of dark green color, which one guide flags as starting past the 3 to 4 inch stage. Yellowed blades do not make premium juice, and the fix is cutting earlier next cycle rather than anything you can do to the tray now.

Seed coats that stay on. Johnny's tells growers to run a hand or a stake over the crop to knock coats off, and to remove plants whose coats will not release. It is a real handling job rather than a trivial one, though not the defining problem it is on sunflower.

Root hairs against mold, the wheatgrass version. Root hair is fine, uniform, white, and attached only to roots, most visible in the root zone and often visibly changed after watering. Mold is irregular, cobwebby or cottony, spreads across seed coats, medium and shoots, and moves away from the roots. On this crop the extra tell is the company it keeps: if the fuzz is on collapsing stems or spreading over the kernel mat, and especially if there is an odor, it is disease.

Nutrition, and what is actually established

There is no USDA FoodData Central record for wheatgrass as a shoot crop, searched 2026-08-08. Sprouted wheat, wheat grain, mature wheat and branded powders are all different foods and none of them is a substitute.

What exists is one small study, and its shape matters. Two wheat varieties were grown indoors, cut at 15 days at 2 cm above the soil, and then analyzed as dried shoot powder and freeze-dried juice powder. It measured proximate composition, chlorophyll, seven minerals, amino acids, phenolics and radical-scavenging activity. Wheatgrass juice powder came out higher in potassium and magnesium than the pulse comparator, and the two varieties differed, with more total chlorophyll in one of them.

Read the method again before using any of that. It is a 15-day crop, cut lower than a juice grower cuts, and processed into powder. A 7 to 12 day fresh tray is a different sample, so those figures describe that experiment rather than your shot.

And then there are the claims. That wheatgrass detoxifies, alkalizes the blood, prevents or treats cancer, or supplies vitamin B12, is not supported by anything opened for this page. The study measured what compounds were present and how the samples behaved in a test tube; it made no clinical claim and neither will this page. That restraint is the honest position, and it is neither the "green blood therapy" position nor the "waste of money" one.

Which seed to buy

Two market classes are sold and no trial separates them. Hard Red Winter is what Johnny's sells as wheat shoot seed, described as a fast producer of dark green leaves, 3 to 5 inch harvest, 7 to 12 days from seeding. Hard Red Spring is sold by others for the same use. Both are T. aestivum, both are genuine market classes rather than relabeled bags, and no controlled trial establishes that either produces more, tenderer, or faster grass under the same conditions. Seller claims either way are assertions.

Buy untreated, food-use seed, sold for shoots or sprouting, with a current germination test and the lot information. Refuse dyed, fungicide-treated or insecticide-treated field seed. This matters more on wheatgrass than on most crops here, because wheat is overwhelmingly grown as a field commodity and treated field seed is abundant and cheap. SDSU Extension is explicit that seed treatment chemicals may be present in the shoots.

A bad lot on this crop is expensive in a specific way. It shows as slow, uneven emergence with soft or rotting kernels and bare patches, and those bare wet patches are exactly where mold starts. Since the seed rate is 450 g, a failed tray also writes off far more seed than a failed brassica tray does.

Is it worth growing?

It depends entirely on whether you actually want wheatgrass juice, and that is not a dodge.

If you do, it is a good crop. It is fast, it germinates readily, the seed is the cheapest per pound in this directory at $3.12, and there is a documented second cut about a week after the first if you leave an inch of stubble. For a home grower with a juicer, a tray a week is easy and fresh grass beats powder on every axis except convenience.

If you are growing it to sell by weight, proceed carefully, because you are flying blind on the one number that decides everything. There is no published yield per 1020 for this crop at all. You will spend $3.10 of seed per tray, the second highest here, on an outcome nobody has measured. Run your own weighed trial before you price anything, and record grams sown, tray area, temperature, light, cut height and harvested ounces, because that record will be better evidence than anything currently published.

Do not grow it because a comparison table makes it look competitive, including the one further down this page. Its yield row is blank on purpose.

Its real competition is not the salad crops, which it does not compete with on eating quality at all. It competes for bench space against anything else you might put there, and it wins when the outlet is fresh juice and loses when the outlet is a bag of greens.

A note on the numbers above

Four fields are blank, which is the most on any entry here, and the yield one is the important one. Wheatgrass is the only crop in this directory where nobody has published what a tray returns. It is absent from the one public trial, whose figures come from at least three 1020 seedings harvested at first true leaf, a stage that does not even apply to a grass. Substituting a forage yield or a vendor calculator would produce a confident, checkable, wrong number, which is the specific failure this site exists to avoid.

The provisional seed rate was too low, and this is the first time that has happened. Every other correction on this site cut the published rate, usually by half or more. Here 250 to 350 g becomes a documented 450. The lesson is not that the old numbers were random but that they were category-average: they drifted toward a typical microgreen tray, which is too much for a fine-seeded brassica and not nearly enough for a cereal.

The cheapest seed in the directory makes one of the most expensive trays, fifth as of 2026-08-09 and second when this page was written. Wheatgrass seed is $3.12 a pound, against mustard's $88.30. That is a 28-fold difference in shelf price, and yet a wheatgrass tray costs $3.10 of seed against mustard's $1.56, because one takes 450 g and the other takes 8. Together those two crops make the point better than any table: shelf price tells you almost nothing about what a tray costs, and the rate does all the work.

A blank means nobody has published that figure. Every crop here has a full research file; where no measured number exists this site leaves the cell empty rather than repeating an estimate. How the numbers work

All 61 crops, sortable, on the microgreen comparison.

Wheatgrass is the row that cannot be completed, and leaving it incomplete is the point. Every other crop here can be ranked on what it returns per dollar and per day of bench space. This one cannot, because the numerator does not exist. A table that filled it with a plausible guess would look more useful and be worth less, and a reader would have no way to tell which cells were measured and which were invented. That distinction is the whole product.

Prices move, so the dollar columns are dated. The rankings are the durable part, and wheatgrass has no ranking until somebody weighs a tray.

Sources

• Johnny's Selected Seeds, wheat hard red winter organic shoot seed - Triticum aestivum, 7 to 12 days from seeding with marketable shoots at 7 to 21 depending on conditions, a 3 to 6 inch harvest, the 8 hour soak with no water reuse, a 2 to 3 day inverted tray removed at about an inch of lift, running a hand or stake over the crop to knock seed coats off and removing plants whose coats will not release, sealed refrigerated storage, fresh pleasantly bitter and mildly sweet flavor, and the 25 lb at $78.00 price behind the cost calculation, listed 2026-08-08.
• Johnny's microgreens yield trial results (PDF) - 29 varieties harvested at first true leaf, with no wheatgrass row. The absence is why no measured seed rate or yield exists for this crop.
• Johnny's microgreens yield trial, method and discussion - the 1020 method, seed weighed by packet difference, larger harvests needing fewer seeds for airflow, and the warning that one system's yields do not translate to another's.
• Bootstrap Farmer, the ultimate microgreen cheat sheet - the 450 g per 10 by 20 tray rate, 4 to 8 hour soak with an explicit warning not to exceed 8, an optional 12 to 24 hour mesh pre-sprout, 2 days blackout, 8 to 10 days ideally 10, keeping it under 75°F, the crop described as mold-prone with bottom watering recommended, and the blades not being digestible whole.
• KidsGardening, wheatgrass growing guide (PDF) - 7 to 10 days after sprouting to about 4 inches, leaves possibly yellowing past 3 to 4 inches, a second harvest about a week after cutting roughly an inch above the soil, blending with fruit to improve palatability, and the note that many people find it unappealing on its own.
• Virginia Cooperative Extension SPES-756 (PDF) - the general 60 to 70°F indoor microgreen range, 50 to 70 percent humidity, and airflow.
• UC IPM, damping-off - Pythium and Rhizoctonia solani, damp conditions favouring them, Pythium often beginning at root tips, and rot at or below the medium line.
• Frontiers in Plant Science, post-mowing regrowth in wheat - regrowth after mowing depending on retained stubble, which is why the documented second cut leaves about an inch.
• International Journal of Food Science and Technology, wheatgrass composition - two wheat varieties grown indoors, cut at 15 days at 2 cm above soil, analyzed as dried shoot powder and freeze-dried juice powder for proximate composition, chlorophyll, seven minerals, amino acids, phenolics and radical-scavenging activity, with juice powder higher in potassium and magnesium than the pulse comparator and higher total chlorophyll in one variety.
• True Leaf Market, hard red winter wheatgrass seeds - hard red winter sold as wheatgrass seed, with thick blades and even growth claimed and no lot test published.
• Home Microgreens, organic hard red spring wheat grass seed - hard red spring sold for the same use, with its day and rate statements being seller assertions rather than a comparative trial.
• SDSU Extension, growing microgreens at home - why seed-treatment chemicals may be present in the shoots and treated field seed is not appropriate to consume.
• USDA FoodData Central - searched 2026-08-08, no record for wheatgrass as a shoot crop.