Fresh herbs!
My wife's brother gave us a six-pod AeroGarden almost a year ago. It's one of those things that seemed neat, but maybe a little silly when I first saw it, but has turned into an important part of our lives. The above picture is what it looks like right now -- four kinds of basil, a thyme and a mint are growing. I've picked several individual basil leaves for meals, particularly from that big one center-left that's trying to hog all the light.
We first grew the set of herbs that came with it and had leaves worth picking inside of three or four weeks. That first set looked like this:
But in the spring, hand-loaded seeds and used it to start plants that we put out into our container garden. We got six extra shishito pepper plants and a couple of Thai eggplant plants that way. Then when it was summer and our lettuces didn't want to grow outside, we grew some in the AeroGarden. Now we're back to fresh herbs!
It's clearly not as good as having a real garden at peak time of year. And I'm sure it's possible to build more sophisticated hydroponic systems for the dedicated hobbyist. But it's a pretty great compromise for us. We're even talking about buying a second (newer, larger, fancier) one but space-limitations are holding us back.
The way it works is that you plug these six plastic frames with a growing medium and seeds into the base unit, which is full of water and nutrients, then you tell the little computer what sort of garden you've planted -- herbs, vegetables, etc. And it cycles water from the base, up to the top of the growth sockets several times per day and turns the LED grow-light on and off on a schedule that's different based on what you're growing. Every so often it reminds you to add more nutrient solution. And it mostly just works.
I've had a small number of saved seeds fail to thrive. And I've had four or so inserts from MiracleGrow get covered in mold instead of producing a plant. They were entirely happy to ship out replacements that worked fine. And between being able to use whatever seeds I want and a fairly broad selection of plants they've curated for use with the garden, it's pretty versatile!
