Air Gardens

I have been posting a lot recently about the many new techniques and inventions that make gardening and homegrown food easy and accessible for people that live in large cities or don’t have access to a real garden. Well this one tops them all. It is a futuristic method of growing that looks very high-tech but is easy to do and relatively affordable.

The basic idea of the Aero Grow product is a garden that can fit in your small apartment or home because it doesn’t use soil or hydroponics. Instead this little garden is just 16 x 9.5 x 11.8 inches and weighs only twelve pounds. I stumbled upon this great innovation in gardening when I visited my grandmother who is at least 80 years old over Thanksgiving. Hopefully this gives you an idea of how labor intensive this product is. Anyways, she has one in her home and as she put it “It like the planters you would imagine a spaceship to have. You don’t even need to water them, it’s all on autopilot.”

I have to hand it to her; this really does sum up the aero garden. The product uses a design in which plant roots are suspended in a high humidity and high oxygen chamber that also regulates nutrient levels through the mist in the chamber. The inventor and now CFO of the product Michael Bissonnette spent years (since 2002) in the testing phase before finally perfecting the idea. The idea was to create a completely self-sufficient garden system that runs on it’s own internal timers and requires very minimal effort. The Aero Grow website even claims that the product produces plants that are more rich in nutrients than soil grown plants because of the completely automated nutrient and oxygen regulators.

Admittedly I can’t quite afford one myself yet. Although there are several different sizes, they are all over $70 bucks but for most people I think that’s not too bad. With the cost of the seed pods which you have to buy from the company and shipping, getting started with “classic” model will cost you around $104. But with Christmas around the corner it might be time to splurge on a great new addition to your home.

Makes You Think a little about all these new Ad campaigns

Today’s consumer culture is changing. This is obvious right? Though we are still emerged in a culture that is founded on the capitalism of yesterday we are beginning to see a new economic movement towards the merging of two seemingly opposing forces—consumption and charity.

Though capitalism is founded on the principle that the living you earn is for your own personal use the idea of sustainable consumption has taken hold and is beginning to change the way we think about buying. The joining of consumption and charity is a particularly interesting topic within the context of sustainability because it through the avenue of consumption that many sustainable projects have taken off.

Lets get down to earth for a minuet, literally. What I’m talking about is the fact that Starbucks, Wal-Mart and many other big corporate businesses as well as small businesses everywhere have begun to make considerable efforts to market their products as “sustainable.” Other times there is a certain percentage of your purchase that gets donated to a charity thus giving consumers the feeling that they are “doing there part” by buying certain product over others. In the simplest sense they are praying on our guilty conscience and making us feel like we can contribute to good causes by consuming.

So what’s the big deal? This is a little manipulative but ultimately it benefits those in need and the earth right? Well maybe. According to some people like Slavo Zizek, a noted philosopher and cultural theorist, this phenomenon is exactly what is keeping us from realizing the flaws of the current capitalist system. Basically we are bandaging a problem and putting it out of mind by doing small things that seem to help the problem. What happens then is that the problem doesn’t get fixed it only gets worse until it is too late and global warming is at our doorstep. It is an interesting conundrum. This illustrated version of Zizek’s argument helps put it all in perspective.