Container Gardening

One of the fun new gardening gadgets out there for curious experimenters right now is the Aerogarden. The Aerogarden is an aeroponic growing system for small plants, completely self-contained. It works like hydroponics, without dirt or mess, just air and moisture and lush plants.

It looks like a great idea, right? But before you shell out over $100 for one, you want to know: does the Aerogarden work? In my experience, the answer is “yes, to a point.”

To start with, the Aerogarden is incredibly easy to use. It gives detailed setup instructions, and has coded lights to tell you when to add water or add nutrients. It turns its grow lights on and off on a regular schedule designed to be best for the plants. You don’t need to know anything about gardening to use it.

Most Aerogardens start you with the Gourmet Herb Seed Kit, and I would definitely advise starting with that one. It contains two kinds of basil, parsley, chives, thyme, mint, and dill. The plants grow incredibly quickly. A few months in, I was chopping off handfuls of herbs to give away to friends and family because I could not use them quickly enough. A month after that, I was chopping off handfuls to compost, because I couldn’t give them away fast enough.

The herbs are the most successful plant for the Aerogarden, in my experience. It is fun to experiment with others: I liked being able to eat cherry tomatoes right off the vine in February, for example, and the lettuce mixes are fun, but in terms of value, I never got the same high-quality, consistent yield I got from herbs with another seed kit.

A few words of warning:

* The Aerogarden’s light is BRIGHT, and depending on your crop, it will be on 16-20 hours a day. You can tell it what time to turn off, but you don’t want to place it anywhere that a bright light coming on would wake you up.

* The Aerogarden is a WATER HOG. Our tap water is poor enough that it doesn’t work well with the nutrient tablets, so we use partly spring water. This can get expensive. Most people’s tap water seems to do fine with the Aerogarden, so take this caution with a grain of salt.

* It is expensive to maintain an Aerogarden. The initial expense is the easy part to see, but even once you’ve paid for the Aerogarden, you will need to replace your grow bulbs regularly, and just the new seed kits cost $20 each. It is an ongoing expense, and you want to make sure the value of the veggies or herbs is worth it to you.

Overall, I am very happy with my Aerogarden. I value fresh herbs highly, and this lets me have them all through the winter. If fresh herbs don’t make as much of a difference to you, it might be too high a cost to pay, but for real lovers of fresh food, it’s a good investment, albeit a significant one.