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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.

by guest blog­ger Sandy Hov­at­ter
You can visit Sandy’s blog at www.ApprehendingGrace.com

Near the bot­tom of the list of ven­dors, nes­tled in the “Soft­ware and Web Devel­op­ment” cat­e­gory, you’ll find a jewel when it comes to cost effec­tive, high qual­ity com­puter train­ing. In today’s job mar­ket, most peo­ple need up-to-date com­puter train­ing, either to be more mar­ketable to a new employer or to become more valu­able to your cur­rent one. Lynda.com is the best, most con­ve­nient, and least expen­sive way I know of to upgrade your com­puter skills.

Whether you want to learn how to get the most out of sophis­ti­cated, com­mer­cial soft­ware like Adobe® InDe­sign® or learn how to use Twit­ter or Face­book, you’ll find what you need at Lynda.com, at a great price. More about price later. First, about the training.

Courses, Courses, Courses
So far, I’ve taken courses in InDe­sign (9 hours), and Word­Press (5 hours). I took both courses after I had been using both prod­ucts for a cou­ple of years. And I learned a great deal! On my list for future train­ing are:

• Quick­Books (6 hours)
• Microsoft Access (5 hours)
• Acro­bat Pro (9 hours)
• Sev­eral Pho­to­shop courses (Lynda.com offers 21 dif­fer­ent Pho­to­shop CS3 courses rang­ing in length from 1.25 hours to 20.75 hours!)
• I might even take the Face­book course (3 hours).

It’s not like I have tons of time on my hands for train­ing, but Lynda.com makes train­ing easy. Each course is bro­ken into short video seg­ments – usu­ally 3–8 min­utes long. You can eas­ily watch a seg­ment or two dur­ing lunch, while wait­ing for a phone call, or sim­ply when you need a short break. The qual­ity is very high, the con­tent is very good and the breadth of offer­ing is phenomenal.

The Lynda.com train­ing library includes more than 730 courses that are avail­able 24/7. You can eas­ily search through the courses by sub­ject, soft­ware, ven­dor, or author.

Did I Men­tion the Great Price?
Every one of their 730 courses offers free video tuto­ri­als so that you can get an idea of the course. The free mod­ules might be as much as half an hour of train­ing. That’s plenty to leave you want­ing more. So when you’re ready to learn more, you can sub­scribe for the low price of $25/month or $250/year. Pre­mium mem­ber­ships, which include exer­cise files so you can prac­tice along with the instruc­tor, are $37.50/month or $375/year. Per­son­ally, I sub­scribe on a monthly basis when our work­load is light or when we have an imme­di­ate need for train­ing. Over the course of a year, I might pur­chase four to six one-month memberships.

I’ve taken pro­fes­sion sem­i­nars on sev­eral dif­fer­ent soft­ware pack­ages. A great price is $149 for a one day course. $1,499 for three days is not uncom­mon. That would be any­where from six months to six years worth of Lynda.com train­ing. And with Lynda.com, you have train­ing in more than 730 courses, not just one.

A final thought: A sub­scrip­tion to Lynda.com is a great gift for just about every­one who uses a computer.

Don’t for­get to jump to Lynda.com from your favorite charity’s shop­ping page on www.ShopOnline4Charity.org.