For years, Cathy Munro kept getting the same question.
As a commercial microgreens grower at Bramble Hill Farm, customers at markets would ask how they could grow microgreens themselves. Cathy would explain where to order soil, where to find seeds and what they needed to do next.
During the pandemic, those questions kept arriving in her inbox too.
Eventually, after more than a decade of growing microgreens commercially, Cathy realized there was probably a better answer: put everything people need in one place and make the process as difficult to mess up as possible.
That became Micro Garden.
The concept is remarkably simple. Each bag contains what you need to grow microgreens, and the bag itself becomes the container they grow in. Cut it open, add the specified amount of water and put it on a windowsill. No special lights or gardening experience required.
The current lineup includes pea shoots, sunflower shoots, broccoli mix and spicy radish, along with a variety designed for cats. Some grow remarkably quickly. The microgreens Cathy showed us during our visit were only nine days old, while pea shoots can grow roughly an inch per day and produce a second crop after the first harvest.
For Cathy, that simplicity is the point.
Micro Garden grew out of seeing the barriers that kept people from growing food themselves. Not everyone has a garden, much space or any idea where to begin. Even buying fresh greens can mean throwing away half a container before getting through it. With Micro Garden, someone in a small apartment can grow on a windowsill year-round and cut only what they need.
The product has now been on the market for just over two years, with Micro Garden available online, at Sobeys and through some distribution outside Nova Scotia.
And now, a product born from conversations with customers at a rural Nova Scotia farm is heading somewhere new.
This spring, Cathy was selected as the Pictou County winner of the INMC Nova Scotia International Startup Competition, earning the opportunity to pitch Micro Garden at the International Network of Michelin Cities Conference in Cuneo, Italy.
The international audience is part of the appeal, but talking to Cathy, it’s clear she’s equally interested in who else will be in the room.
She described the entrepreneurs heading to Cuneo as people working on the cutting edge of all kinds of different ideas. For someone building a business herself, there’s value in simply getting that many people who are making, experimenting and figuring things out into the same place.
There will be pitching. There will be new connections. And, according to Cathy, there had better be some Italian wine and pasta in there somewhere too.
For something designed to grow on a windowsill, Micro Garden is about to get a considerably bigger view.