Archive for June, 2010

The AeroG­a­r­den is an indoor, com­pact, self-contained hydro­ponic gar­den­ing sys­tem. They come in a vari­ety of sizes and col­ors with prices start­ing at only $49, includ­ing free ship­ping. They call it a “kitchen gar­den” because it can eas­ily fit on most people’s kitchen counter tops or any small space, allow­ing you to grow fresh veg­eta­bles, herbs, or flow­ers all year long.

Ever since we first saw this prod­uct adver­tised, Sandy and I have wanted one. We finally took the plunge when Sandy saw a good sale price on one of their mod­els. If you’re inter­ested in this prod­uct, visit their site every week to shop for sales. AeroG­a­r­den looks for any excuse to run a sale. (Don’t for­get to jump there each time from your favorite charity’s shop­ping page on ShopOnline4Charity.)

The sale that Sandy found was so good that she bought two units, both of them the AeroG­a­r­den Space­Saver 6 model, in an appro­pri­ately space-age sil­ver color. Both came with a Gourmet Herbs seed pod set (a com­bi­na­tion of basil, thyme, oregano, dill, mint and chives). She also wanted to grow salad greens, so she ordered one of those seed pod sets separately.

Assem­bly and plant­ing of our new AeroG­a­r­dens was a snap. The whole process took just a few min­utes. Then the wait­ing began…

For­tu­nately, we didn’t have to wait long. Within just a cou­ple of days the salad greens started to sprout. We were advised in the plant­ing kit that the herbs are slower grow­ing and would take longer, and we’ve found that to be true. It’s been a real hoot for us to check our gar­dens every day to see how much they’ve grown. The salad greens lit­er­ally dou­bled in size every day for sev­eral days in a row!

Main­te­nance is a piece of cake. The units we bought have sen­sors that tell us when to add nutri­ents and water, but even if you buy mod­els that don’t fea­ture this, all you do is remem­ber to add nutri­ents every two weeks and water as needed. The nutri­ents are pro­vided with your kit, either as tablets or pack­ets of liquid.

Yes­ter­day, less than four weeks from plant­ing day, we enjoyed our first har­vest of salad greens. Instruc­tions advise never har­vest­ing more than one-third of the growth at a time. Our first har­vest pro­vided enough let­tuce for a huge din­ner salad for both of us. Today we’re hav­ing spaghetti for lunch, sea­soned with fresh basil from our herb gar­den. (See our photo below.)

Like I said ear­lier, AeroG­a­r­dens come in a wide vari­ety of sizes and con­fig­u­ra­tions, rang­ing from 3-pod mod­els to extra-tall 7-pod units. They offer lots of seed pods for each type of unit allow­ing you to grow many dif­fer­ent types of herbs; veg­eta­bles such as cherry or heir­loom toma­toes, green beans, dif­fer­ent kinds of pep­pers; and sev­eral kinds of flow­ers. They even have a pod set for grow­ing your own tea plants! What’s more, they have kits for using your AeroG­a­r­den to start seedlings for trans­plant­ing to your out­door garden.

We’ve been thrilled with our AeroG­a­r­dens. They are ideal for apart­ment dwellers, fam­i­lies with kids, class­room projects or home school­ers, shut-ins, dorm rooms, or any­one who’s become con­vinced that they don’t have a green thumb but want some home grown fresh­ness in their diet. Grow­ing some of your own food is fun and is a great idea. AeroG­a­r­den makes it fool-proof. Highly recommended.