for those of you who saw my growing greens indoors three ways video you know that i promised you an
update of how the aerogarden did with growing tomatoes and peppers so today as you can see i've
successfully got a crop of ripe cherry tomatoes here not tasted them yet but they are red and they
are ripe now before i give these guys the taste test i'm going to share the growing process with
you so for those of you who are not familiar with the aerogarden it is an all-in-one home hydroponic
kit it comes with everything you need and is super easy to put together as you can see here
so
and when you've got it assembled you simply pop in one of the pods now you can buy these
either pre-seeded with varieties or you can seed your own and for this first time out i
went with aerogarden's pre-seeded pods this one was listed as a mini heirloom red cherry
tomato and this one as a jalapeno i really hate not knowing what specific varieties i'm growing
but for the sake of experimentation i figured i'd just start with these
so as you can see this cherry tomato is a really nice compact size that fits well
in this space i ran into some trouble with the jalapeno this guy pretty much wanted to
be a full-sized jalapeno so i just let him go i did not prune or trim or anything to begin with
and i had branches clear up to here now unfortunately with the first go-around
it was setting all of its flowers up above the height of this light so i wasn't going to end up
with any fruit anyway i decided to aggressively hack this way back and see what would happen
now fortunately it did sprout out a lot of new growth put on new branches put on new blooms
and i've got a few blooms down here now that hopefully will result in some
peppers i've had to hack it back up here because it keeps wanting to grow up here
and unfortunately some of my blooms are setting up here as well so by cutting all this back i'm
reducing my yields pretty significantly so i am going to give this another try using my own
seeds in these pods because i have a couple different varieties that are true dwarfs that
should stay below the level of this light because this is at the highest point that it will go now
another issue that i ran into and i did not think about it first was that because this plant is not
rooted into anything this is just water in here by the time it set all this fruit it became quite
top-heavy so i didn't have a good way to anchor this i ended up just tying it to my paper towel
holder which did the trick but was not the most aesthetically pleasing
option in the world so i will definitely have to be looking at some tricks to support
these a little better once they're fully loaded with fruit and to give you an idea of how long
it took to get to this point the day i am filming today is april 12th and i started these from seed
on january 8th so i was hoping they might come to fruit a little sooner than like a standard garden
grown tomato but that was not the case they took their sweet time and i thought it would be fun
to show a quick time progression of the process of growth on this tomato and pepper so check this out
so that brings us to today you will note that the foliage on this tomato is starting to look pretty
rough and if you're growing this i wouldn't be overly concerned or surprised by this as long as
it's happening after your fruits start forming and coloring and that is because the plants basically
putting all of its energy into ripening these fruit not maintaining healthy foliage anymore
so at this point the foliage becomes less of a concern than bringing this fruit to maturity
another thing i wanted to point out for those of you who might be interested in doing this yourself
just a few keys to think about is that if you're doing fruiting plants like tomatoes and peppers
you are going to have to hand pollinate so in nature outdoors the bees and other pollinators
will do this work for you indoors typically you don't have any bees so you're going to have to act
as the bee now i started this i did not realize aerogarden actually sells a tool i think it's
called like be the bee and it's a pollinator tool don't waste your money you can do the same thing
with a little tiny soft paint brush and all you're going to do is get that bristle in there kind of
knock loose some pollen get it on the bristles and go to your next flower and do the same thing
that's what i did with this tomato and you can see that my set is really good for such a small
tomato the other thing that you can do is shake the plants and that will work because you will
drop some pollen and hopefully it will land on some of the other flowers but it's not going to
be quite as effective as actually going in there and hand pollinating the other thing i did not
realize because i didn't have to do this with my lettuce because it's such a short maturity
is that with these vegetables that take longer to grow you are supposed to be
changing out your water every it ends up to being about every month so in the beginning
that's not a big deal but as these plants get larger it gets more and more difficult to do
you just have to very carefully basically tip this thing over a sink drain out all the water and then
refill it with new water so that's just something to be aware of and then the other lesson that i
learned is that as i mentioned before you're only supposed to be doing two plants in here
if you're doing larger like tomatoes and peppers well you've got four other holes that are open
i thought that i could just be clever and come in with these little lids from my seed pods
and cover those holes apparently what you want are actually completely
opaque coverings so again of course aerogarden sells little plugs that you can use but after
digging a little online i found that people were having success just using things like duct tape or
just you could do the same thing with these if you spray painted them black and that is to inhibit
the growth of the green algae that you will get in this kit if it is getting any light in there
so i made do with this it was fine but i did have a little bit of that algae growth which
was undesirable and if you have an aerogarden and there's any other tricks that you have discovered
to doing this thing definitely let me know in the comments below but now the moment
that i have been eagerly awaiting for months i'm going to give these guys the taste test
i have one tomato on here i've been eyeballing it was the very first one to ripen
oh she's so cute and keep in mind i have not had a fresh tomato since last september and beginning
of october definitely smells like a tomato ah i want to say that was the most amazing thing ever
it was not so i waited four months for a tomato that tasted worse than what i could buy at the
grocery store that's really depressing okay lesson learned but i am not giving up hope yet
like i said i have a few other varieties that i know are supposed to have good flavor and
i'm gonna try those in here next and if i don't succeed with those i may just stick to growing
lettuce and herbs in this thing and if you have any really great varieties that have yielded
terrific flavor grown in the aerogarden please drop a line in the comments below because i
definitely will want to try those and in the meantime wish me luck that my jalapenos turn
out tasting a little better than my tomatoes did thanks for watching and i'll see you next time