I Never Wanted A Garden – Now I’m Having A Love Affair With My Gardyn

Nothing from a dozen CES conventions has captured the imagination of friends, family and neighbors like the Gardyn, which I’ve been using for well more than a month now.  Starting a garden during the middle of winter seemed like something you’d only dream of, but with this marvelous creation, we not only started everything from seed, but we’ve been having fresh and nutritious salads every day now for a couple weeks. Not only that, it takes up less than two square feet of space next to our kitchen patio door.

After seeing the product at CES, I spoke with FX Rouxel, Gardyn’s creator and CEO. He dispelled several reservations I had about the viability of actually growing enough product to make it worth the investment of time and energy. Some of the great points he made:

• Through the use of hydroponics and the IoT, there is almost no work involved to start and maintain your garden. With hydronics, water is recycled over and over, saving as much as 95% compared to watering an outdoor garden.
• You can grow almost anything other than root vegetables or trees. They have more than three dozen vegetables, fruits, herbs and flowers you can choose from (and they are adding more each month) – and you can mix and match to your heart’s content.
• Through the smartphone app you install, you are literally held by the hand with reminders whenever it’s time to add water or plant food…and even when it’s time to start harvesting.
• We keep our house pretty cool in the wintertime, so I feared that would be an issue, but FX explained that anywhere people are comfortable, the Gardyn will be also. 
• Miniature LED lights provide all the light the plants need, and the large water tank at the base pumps water to each of the “pods” a couple times a day.
• If you are going away, the garden can be set on vacation mode. On-board cameras even let you check in on your garden while traveling.

Don’t plant – build your garden

I was sold, and two boxes arrived shortly thereafter.  One included the four-foot long light fixtures and the other had all the other components.

The assembly took maybe a half-hour and went exceedingly well. The only part that gave me any pause was hooking up the little right-angle connectors for the hoses.  I was concerned about possibly breaking them as I forced the hose onto the connectors, but my fears were unfounded.

The kit came with 30 pods which each come ready to place in the holders.  The seeds are already in a bed of Rockwool, which takes the place of soil, so there’s no talent needed to “plant” your Gardyn. 

After placing the pods, it was just a matter of loading the tank with water, plugging it into an outlet, and flipping the switch to “On”.

For the first ten days, there was literally nothing else to do other than watch as the 30 young plants began to sprout.  After that, I got a notification on my phone that it was time to add plant food, (which was included in the original box.) 

Simply diluting one measure of food in some water really seemed to be the trick that started everything moving. 

By one month, we were ready to start harvesting and enjoying a truly fresh salad. 

And we’ve been harvesting and harvesting every few days ever since.  Just last week, on one day alone, I bagged ¾ of a pound of lettuce and other greens for my daughter. 

FX said to expect each Gardyn to produce 8 to 10 pounds of produce each month, and I’m guessing he’s right.

While I have been having a salad a day for years now, I was pretty much in a rut, buying the same four or five ingredients each and every week.  I never knew there were so many choices out there. Romaine was always my go-to variety, but I never knew, and my local groceries never carried, all the many varieties of Romaine that really make my salads interesting now. 

Oops

The other day, I happened to accidentally pour Ranch dressing on my salad. I thought I was grabbing the Poppyseed, but by the time my brain kicked in, it was too late. Now, I consider Ranch dressing to be one of the blandest and most boring varieties in existence and would never have used it, had I been paying attention. So, the only thing to do was to spice it up.

I went over to the Gardyn and cut off a few leaves of Arugula, Basil and Thyme. I then cut them up into small pieces and mixed them around and into the entire salad.  What an amazing difference those few leaves made – the salad was actually very enjoyable again – and nothing was wasted.  

Do your budgeting and make the investment

Gardyn has a number of ways to get started and to stay engaged with indoor gardening.  There are even payment plans to spread out the cost of getting started over 12 or 24 months. 

There’s no doubt that it’s an investment to get started gardening with the Gardyn, but if you love salad as much as I do, you’ll never regret the purchase.  To help you get started, here are a few of my tips learned from the first month or so of Gardyn-ing:

• Follow the instructions!  Don’t add plant food until the seeds have had a chance to sprout – the app will tell when to add food for the first time. Luckily, I followed the instructions, and every single pod is growing well now.
• After two weeks I was getting a tad anxious, nothing was close to being ready to pick.  But wait patiently, in another couple weeks the progress was nothing less than amazing! Now I am cutting and enjoying fresh greens just about every day.
• If you are into herbs, they are the slowest growing, so don’t expect to be picking mint, cilantro, chives, etc. until well into the second 30 days of growing.  Lettuce is much, MUCH more fast-growing.
• If you are trying to figure where you can put it, it needs an electric outlet, but it’s only 24” wide, 64” tall, and sticks out from the wall about 18”.  That’s less than two square feet of floor space.
• Make sure you have a slender pair of gardening shears so you can clip certain large leaves from the outside of each plant while still leaving the small leaves in the center to keep growing.
• If you join the membership plan, you will get 10 new pods each month which will easily give you the opportunity to try all the different vegetables, herbs, fruits, and flowers they offer.
• Other advantages to the membership plans include sizable discounts on future pod purchases, automated reminders from “Kelby” the virtual assistant, a “vacation mode” that slows the growing progress while you are away, and access to Gardyn’s plant tech people to answer any of your questions.
• Read the “What you grow” section of their website which tells you so much about the plants, how to harvest them and how to use them in various recipes.  (This is even worthwhile checking before you order – Warning – this alone will likely hook you on the possibilities.)  
• Winter is the perfect time to start some flowers.  When warm weather finally arrives, you can take the pods out and place them in your garden to continue growing, but you’ll already have something green on day one to enjoy.  The pods are biodegradable, so no worry.  Just water them generously when first transplanting…they’ve become used to getting watered twice daily in the Gardyn.
• My wife discovered that not only do the lights work for plants growing in the Gardyn, they also work for houseplants growing next to it. Also note, down at the bottom, we’ve got the next batch of seedlings starting to germinate in a little tray with a 1/4″ of plain water.

• Lastly, the lights go on and off by themselves, based on the growth algorithm built into Kelby. But, the bonus is that it makes a great night light in the garden area.

I could continue to sing the praises of the Gardyn, but you’ll never fully appreciate the convenience of having fresh produce available every day until you try it.  Never worry again about washing off all the pesticides farmers use, or cleaning the dirt from between your lettuce leaves – there’s none of that – ever again. 

Merely snip directly into your salad bowl and enjoy.  I sure am.

Now excuse me. I’m off to my Gardyn. It’s lunchtime.

Disclosure:  Gardyn provided a starter kit so that I could try it and do this review.  Opinions expressed here, however, are and always will be strictly my own.