Sometimes a small effort on our part can produce enormous benefits both personally and globally. For example, growing sprouts in our kitchens through the winter is an easy way to make a big difference.

Sprouting seeds in jars or trays is a traditional way of producing delicious and nutritious, fresh organic vegetables in less than a week. And, eating homemade sprouts instead of west-coast lettuce is a wonderful way to "just say no" to some of the most damaging aspects of our food system.

This winter, I've been growing a steady supply of a combination of alfalfa, radish and Chinese cabbage sprouts. This mix has a zesty blend of flavors, a wonderful crisp crunchiness and lots of nutritional benefits.

Sprouting seeds is very easy. We take advantage of their stored energy. When the warmth, moisture and air needed for germination are provided, the embryo closed in the softened seed coat comes to life. It sends out a tiny root and lifts the cotyledons which surrounded it inside the seed, up to the light as they open and turn green.

We make sprouts in a wide-mouth, quart canning jar capped with a piece of flexible window screening held on with a canning band. Start with about two tablespoons of seeds. Soak them overnight in tepid water. Soaking softens the seeds and facilitates the germination process.

The next morning pour out the soaking water, rinse the seeds with fresh, cool water and drain them. Repeat the rinsing and draining process two-to-four times daily. After three or four days, the little plants will be big enough to eat. As you keep rinsing and eating them, they will continue to grow. After a week to ten days the sprouts will have grown all they can using their stored energy. If they're not all eaten by then, put them in the refrigerator. They are still alive, though, and appreciate an occasional rinsing to bring in fresh air and water and to remove waste products.

Start a second jar before the first one is empty and you'll have a continuous harvest of this delicious food!

Sprouts are a great snack. We also use them on sandwiches, with eggs and stir-frys, as well as for salads and as a garnish on soups and stews. The radish sprouts provide a pleasant tang. The cabbage sprouts are very flavorful. Members of the brassica family, cabbage and radish sprouts supply important, health-building flavonoids, antioxidants and protective enzyme inducers for our bodies. Alfalfa sprouts have a milder taste in addition to lots of vitamins and helpful enzymes.

Many other seeds can be sprouted too! Grains such as wheat, rye, barley and buckwheat make good sprouts, as do legumes like lentils, mung and garbanzo beans. Seeds for sunflowers, onions, fenugreek and many of the greens we grow in the garden can be sprouted. Most of the plants in those expensive mesclun salad mixes can be grown together as sprouts to provide delicious flavor.

We start with fresh, organic seed from the natural food store. You can use regular garden seeds if you're certain they haven't been treated with chemicals. Although the seeds may seem expensive, two tablespoons of them grow to fill a quart jar in a week. A pound of alfalfa seeds will produce 12 gallons of sprouts.

Once you get production going on the sprout farm around your kitchen sink, you'll have no reason any more to buy iceberg lettuce shipped in from western deserts. The USDA says that 92 percent of our lettuce is grown there, that 62 different chemicals are used to grow it, and that over half of the lettuce samples tested contained detectable pesticide residues. Expensive government irrigation projects water that lettuce to the severe detriment of other ecosystems.

Very large west coast lettuce farms depend on low-paid immigrant labor to harvest the crop and on a large fleet of trucks to deliver their product, which is 95 percent water, all the way across the country.

Growing sprouts in your kitchen may seem like a small bit of agriculture, but it is one of the most powerful steps you can take to improve the health of your family and the environment.

Discover the joys of sprouting. Start some today.

This is Bill Duesing, Living on the Earth

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