If you wash out empty eggshells, you can draw faces on the front and grow ‘egglings’ with cress hair!

L. sativum is often used in experiments to teach biology to students in schools; the plant grows readily on damp paper or cotton, and its fast germination and development time makes it useful in demonstrating plant growth.Cress, sometimes referred to as garden cress to distinguish it from similar plants also referred to as cress, is a rather fast-growing, edible herb. In the United Kingdom, cut cress shoots are commonly used in sandwiches with boiled eggs and mayonnaise. It is also eaten as sprouts, and the fresh or dried seed pods can be used as a peppery seasoning ( haloon). I'm a peat-free, organic gardener, but I'm also fascinated by hydroponics and the more high-tech ways of feeding people.

If you sow your seeds in the morning then they may have started to germinate by bedtime – small white roots will be visible. In a 100-gram ( 3 + 1⁄ 2-ounce) reference quantity, raw cress supplies 134 kilojoules (32 kilocalories) of food energy and numerous nutrients in significant content, including vitamin K (516% of the Daily Value, DV), vitamin C (83% DV) and vitamin A (43% DV). A delicious salad and sandwich ingredient, Mustard Cress takes up little space and a very small amount of your time.

In some regions, garden cress is known as mustard and cress, garden pepper cress, pepperwort, pepper grass, or poor man's pepper.

When consumed raw, cress is a high- nutrient food containing substantial content of vitamins A, C and K and several dietary minerals.If it’s the middle of winter and there’s nothing much going on in the vegetable garden, or you want some easy and ultra-fresh salad greens, or a rainy day project to help keep the kids occupied, then try growing mustard and cress! If you want something a bit milder, look for oilseed rape (canola) seeds – they can be grown the same way. Consumers commonly acquire cress as seeds or (in Europe) from markets as boxes of young live shoots.