Gardyn and Aerogardens – fresh food at your fingertips

Several months ago, I bought a Gardyn ( pronounced guard-dean). It’s a 2 foot square footprint tower that holds 30 plants. When you order one it comes with a mix of herbs, lettuces, tomatoes, and peppers.

Basically, you assemble it (which is not inconsequential – you may want to fortify with wine, during or after), fill it with water, put the plants in their pods, and wait until things grow. And grow they do. Here’s a pic of some of my lettuces. I can make a salad every day. I also have tomatoes and peppers above the lettuce. You can see a green tomato at the top middle.

That row of small ones in the middle and the tiny one on the lower left are replacements that I just sprouted from seeds and put in to replace the lettuce my cat stole (watercress is a stringy taunt), and a couple that had bolted and were now bitter.

In the lower left, you can see a small nursery where I have some sprouting chard, lettuce and strawberry plants that I will use to replace the other plants as they age out.

When you first set up a Gardyn, you get an app assistant, that keeps an eye on your plants through 2 cameras mounted on the lights. She’ll tell you when the water is running low, if it looks like you attracted bugs, when to add food, and anything else you need to know to take care of your plants.

Every day, I can have a salad with tomatoes and basil or herbs I pick from my Gardyn (or my Aerogardens). Tomatoes and snow peas (nom nom) do especially well in Aerogardens. Here is just one tomato plant. Don’t do like I did and plant more than three unless you want to feed a family. Instead, plant one, wait a month or two. Then plant another and continue like that. It should keep you in rolling waves of tomatoes.

If you are interested, here is the info you need to get started:

You can buy a Gardyn at mygardyn.com – it’s pricey but it includes your first 30 plants – this code gets you some discount — rfkristen61750.