Hey everyone! This blog is about sustainable and healthy food. Ill be posting at least once a week about the things and people in the world who are making our food sources healthier and more sustainable. Ill also be tackling some of the relevant issues and debates within the sustainable food community today. Hope you enjoy, and if you do let me know!

Tuesday, December 14, 2010

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.

1 comment:

  1. very good. very interesting. and i like the images. but i think you could have gone deeper. why is this meaningful? why do you care? why should we care? Still, very good

    B+

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