A while back I thought an indoor garden would be nice so I could have fresh herbs and vegetables year-round. I thought a hydroponic or aeroponic system would be best so I could eliminate plant pots and increase the number of plants I could keep. I decided against it at the time for a few reasons: first, the only spot in my house that gets any direct sunlight is the landing on the steps, which isn’t a large area. I assumed that the yield of fruits wouldn’t be high enough for it to be worth my time. Second, I have cats, and cats love to mess around with plants, so I’d have to come up with some kind of cat exclusion system. Finally, it would cost a decent amount of money that I didn’t really want to spend at the time and it would take a long time to design and refine.
A few weeks ago at my parents’ house, my mom was showing me her plants and I realized I completely forgot about the existence of grow lights. I had a little Jimmy Neutron brain blast when the revelation that I could create a vegetable and herb farm in my basement hit me. I could set up a couple of shelves with grow lights, and the plants would get plenty of light and no trouble from the cats. I set to work doing some research and development.
I knew I wanted an aeroponic garden over a hydroponic one. Aeroponics is basically an advanced hydroponic setup with less complexity. In an aeroponic garden, plants are held in the air above a pool of water where nutrient-laden water is pumped through nozzles aimed at the plants’ roots. There is no dirt or other growth medium involved. There are many different hydroponic setups, but you can build one with the same nozzle setup as the aeroponic systme and add rocks for the roots to grab onto. My research seemed to indicated that hydroponic gardens are popular, and aeroponic gardens are a thing, there was a lot less information out there on the latter. For both kinds there was a dearth of how-to type information. The best aeroponic DIY resources I found were a couple of YouTube videos. I roughly followed them and I have the beginnings of a garden now.
A quick aside into why you might want an aero/hydroponic garden seems in order. Both aeroponic and hydroponic systems can grow larger, healthier plants more quickly than dirt can because of the control you have over the whole system. You can easily adjust the nutrient mix and concentration, amount of light the plants get and the amount of water they get. Additionally, the roots of the plants have much better access to oxygen than they do in the dirt. Because you don’t need a pot for each plant you can, depending on you setup, fit more plants per square foot than you could with dirt. Hydroponic and aeroponic systems are a really efficient way to grow plants. Plus, throwing seeds in dirt and waiting just feels a little to neolithic to me.
A couple of pictures can probably describe my garden better than words, so here you go:
I have the pump connected to a basic outlet timer that mists the roots for 30 minutes each hour, and then turns the pump off for 30 minutes of rest. The garlic seems to be doing very well so far. I have an oregano sprout coming up, so hopefully that will be in a net pot next week. The other seeds haven’t shown anything yet, but I remain hopeful. The germination time for most of them was 10-28 days, so I should start seeing something in the next couple days.
Everything is working perfectly so far, I just need to get some more plants into it. I noticed a mildly foul smell when checking the pH this morning, so I may have to black out the lid eventually, but I’m going to wait and see. It might just be wet garlic/plastic. This one bin is a proof of concept that, if it works, will be scaled up into several bins on a shelf in the basement. I’ll update when I get another plant or two into the garden.