For the most part, today’s harvest was going to plan as normal. Cilantro and sango radish were harvested. Mixes were created and packaged. Labels were created and marked with the harvest date and microgreen weight. When the basil trays came out to be harvested, that's when something out of the ordinary was witnessed. Typically, the trays of basil are beautifully uniform with each plant displaying their distinct leaves. This week, however, I noticed other leaves sprinkled throughout the various trays that did not resemble the true leaves of the basil plant or the cotyledons. I pulled the Head of Cultivation over to ask him what exactly I was looking at and how I should go about harvesting the tray without getting anything but the basil in the bowl to be packaged later. After inspecting the tray, he informed me that the unknown plants throughout the tray were far from unknown. They were cilantro plants. Because the seeding process of each tray is done by hand with little to no chance of getting other seeds into trays they were not intended for, I was not sure how this could have happened. He referred to the problem as loose seed tray hygiene. There is a process after harvest that the crew goes through where the soil of the harvested trays are dumped into buckets to be donated and the trays are washed to be reused. During this process, a tray could have had the soil dumped out of it but wasn’t thoroughly washed. This can leave seeds that did not germinate in the tray. Although the trays are then covered in soil again and seeded with new seeds, those other seeds from the previous harvest may begin the process of germinating and growing alongside the new seeds. In this, trays are no longer exactly all one type of plant. Although this isn’t a huge deal for harvesting, even though it does waste needed time by having to weed out the outlier plants, it becomes a big issue for live trays. Some restaurants order live trays to be delivered in order to cut the greens during the cooking process of their foods, this makes the greens ultra fresh when they are either included in the meal or used as garnish. A tray that is not uniform looks rather unprofessional and does not make a good statement for the company. As a result of all of this, the Head of Cultivation described how in their specific business, seed tray hygiene is one of the most important first steps to growing.