How to Build a Microgreens Seeding Schedule

If you sell microgreens to restaurants, grocers, or a farmers market stand, the date that actually matters isn't the day you seed — it's the day you promised delivery. Everything else on the calendar gets worked out backward from there. Get the math wrong by even a day or two and you're either short on inventory or holding trays that are already past their best cut window.

Here's the planning method growers use to get that math right every time, plus how to skip the manual part entirely.

The four stages, in order

A microgreens crop moves through up to four stages between seed and harvest:

1. Soak — some seeds (peas, sunflower, and other larger seeds) need a soak before seeding to kickstart germination. Small seeds like radish or broccoli usually skip this step entirely.
2. Seed — seed goes down on the growing medium.
3. Move to light — after a blackout/germination period in the dark (or under a weight, depending on your setup), trays come out into light to green up.
4. Harvest — the crop reaches cutting height and gets harvested.

Each stage takes a different number of days depending on the variety — sunflower and pea shoots generally run longer overall than fast crops like radish or arugula — and those timings are specific to how you grow, not a single universal number. The planning method stays the same regardless of variety: you always work backward from harvest day.

Working backward from a harvest date

Say a restaurant order needs to be delivered on a Friday. To find your seed date (and soak date, if the variety needs one), you subtract each stage's length from the harvest date, in order:

• Start at the harvest date.
• Subtract the days of light needed to get the move-to-light date.
• Subtract the days of germination/dark from that to get the seed date.
• Subtract the days of soaking, if the variety needs it, to get the soak date.

For a variety that needs, say, 5 days of light and 4 days in the dark before that, a Friday harvest means trays need to move into light the previous Monday, and seed needs to go down the Thursday before that. Add a soak day for a variety that needs one, and the actual first action on your calendar is a full week and a half before the customer ever sees the product.

That's straightforward for one variety and one order. It gets genuinely hard to track by hand once you're running multiple varieties, multiple customers, and recurring weekly orders at the same time — which is most working farms.

Where this breaks down at scale

The backward math itself never changes. What breaks is doing it manually for every order, every variety, every week — and then tracking which trays still need to be seeded today versus tomorrow, which ones are overdue, and how much seed to weigh out before you even start. A missed line in a spreadsheet is a missed delivery.

We built a free tool that does this math for you

We built the Rooted Planner because we needed exactly this for our own farm relationships, and figured most other growers were solving the same problem with a whiteboard or a spreadsheet. It's free, it's not tied to owning our equipment, and it handles:

• A variety library with typical soak, germination, and light timings for common microgreens — or add your own numbers for anything you grow.
• Backward scheduling from a harvest date, automatically, for every order.
• Standing orders — set a weekly rhythm per customer and the next six weeks of orders and tasks generate themselves.
• Daily task lists so you can see what's overdue, due today, and coming up, and check items off as you go.
• Seed weigh-out totals for every seeding day, and a printable day sheet for the bench.

If you're currently doing this math on paper or in a spreadsheet, it's worth trying — start planning for free, no credit card and no install required.