My goal this year is to not have to buy any greens from the grocery store. So I'm working on
extending my season, not just outdoors but by growing indoors as well. Now typically I do
sprouts and microgreens through the winter, but I wanted something a little more substantial-
lettuce and chard and spinach and mustard and those types of things more in a full-size leaf.
So I started off trying three different indoor growing methods and I wanted to share my progress
so far. Now my first method was a splurge. I'm trying out an Aerogarden and the model
that I got was the Harvest Elite Slim. It's an all-in-one home hydroponic kit and they've
made this thing essentially foolproof. Assembly is pretty straightforward,
the instructions are easy to follow, it doesn't take much to put it together.
There's a fill-to line for the water level, it comes with handy little pre-seeded pods
or you can buy blank ones and seed your own, and it comes with the
liquid nutrients that you use to feed your vegetables. So you set the whole thing up,
you program it with the time, you select the type of vegetables that
you're growing and that will calculate the number of hours that the light is on.
And you turn it on and that's it. It will let you know when it needs fertilized,
I believe it lets you know if the water line gets too low. It's all automated and it works
awesome unless you have a husband who tends to keep unplugging your your kit and then you
have to reset it and start all over! The kit features a 20 watt led grow light and
something I found interesting was that the lowest setting, which was I believe the flower garden,
has the light on for 15 and a half hours all the way up to you can do like a 24 hour setting. So I
chose the lowest for my greens, again at 15 and a half hours, but that's a lot longer than my
outdoor growing greens would typically have sun exposure, so I found that interesting.
So the next kit I decided to use was my old standby seed starting kit. I wanted to see
if I could do something similar on the cheap since I already had all of the components.
I've talked about the seed starting kit in other videos, but it's a really simple setup. So
basically you've got a styrofoam tray that you pop grow plugs into and these are soilless grow plugs.
You fill the bottom tray with water so that your styrofoam
and your plugs float on the water and they they're able to draw up as much moisture as they need.
And then you sew whatever seeds you want into the pre-dibbled holes
You pop on a clear cover to act as a humidity dome to help speed germination and put it under
lights. Now the light that I'm using is again one that I just purchased with this kit and it is a
full spectrum fluorescent light. And I set this light automatically for 12 hours of light a day
which is closer to what my seedlings would be getting outdoors. And now once your seedlings
are up and growing, much like the hydroponic kit you just add liquid nutrients to the water in this
one to help feed your seedlings. And lastly to attempt growing greens on the super cheap, I tried
the old 2 solo cup method. So this one couldn't be cheaper or easier-- you take two plastic cups,
you drill a hole for drainage in the bottom of one and fill that one up with soil. I then took the
second cup and added some pebbles to the bottom so that my first cup wasn't standing in water
and then planted that up with lettuce seed.
I used a clear plastic baggie as a humidity dome and then set the whole thing in a sunny
south-facing window. Now it's important to note we're at the shortest day length of the
entire year here in the northern hemisphere. so from sunrise to sunset we're at about nine
hours. So my solo cups are getting significantly less light than either of the other growing
methods. So exactly one month later how did all of these growing methods size up? So first
is the Aerogarden and let's be honest, this is kind of amazing! I have been really impressed
by this thing. It's totally worth it if you have some spare change lying around and are
a total beginner to indoor or hydroponic growing. It's a great kit- as I mentioned before the whole
system is automated, it tells you exactly what to do and when to do it. The only thing
I will say is lettuce or greens are not the most difficult of all the vegetables to grow indoors,
so I am going to try some fruiting vegetables-- some tomatoes and peppers with this thing the next
time and see how it does with those because that will be the real trick. So be sure to stay tuned
for that video! So the second kit, I love this one for seed starting but you can see it's pretty far
behind the Aerogarden in terms of how quickly these leaves are sizing up. Now this would be
great if you wanted to cut like baby green sized lettuce but I was hoping for full size lettuce.
So I think I'm going to make a few tweaks and see if I can't get this one up to par.
I'm going to play with the system a little bit. I want to get this thing fitted with a full spectrum
led instead of a fluorescent and see if that helps since that's what the Aerogarden is using,
and then I'm going to leave this light on for 15 and a half hours a day also and see if the
extra light will help speed that maturity as well. But overall I think this does show some
promise especially for growing leafy greens. And finally, this is my sad sad excuse for lettuce.
As you can see my solo cup experiment was a failure. I am just not getting enough light
even in a south-facing window through the winter months to successfully grow greens.
I think this would probably work fine with some supplemental light, like if I maybe just threw it
under the same grow light that I was doing with my seed starting kit or if you live in a place where
you're getting a little more sunlight through the days this probably would work. But for me
here in the winter this is just not going to be a realistic growing method. So I'm going to continue
trying different methods and seeing what works. But definitely let me know if you have an indoor
growing method that works really well for you- in particular for growing salad greens please let
me know. I would love to hear some suggestions! Thanks for watching and I'll see you next time!