Flowers Blooming in the Aero Garden

My husband and I are not what one would call “gadget nuts”, and we rarely go after whatever the latest trend is. There are times, however, when we look at something that has either been highlighted on a show like, “I Want That”, or something we see advertised. While I try to stay away from mentioning brands in this blog, in this case it serves to illustrate a point. A few years ago after seeing one in action, we decided to buy an Aero Garden. If you aren’t familiar with it, that’s the table top system that you set up inside in order to grow a variety of vegetables, herbs, or flowers. It has a base with small circular recesses where specially designed pods fit in and a lamp on an arm above that. The amount of water required in the base of the unit is fairly small and there are nutrients that you add periodically. Whatever you are growing comes out of the seed pods and you simply cut the produce or herbs when ready – no dirt involved.

Since the summer here is too hot for lettuces, our plan was to grow them so we had a year round supply. It does work, however, with only one machine, there were two problems. The first was quantity in that the yield was only adequate to give us about four salads per week and if we’re home, we each have a salad at every meal except on Fridays because that’s always pizza night. The second point is that when you count in the cost of the pods and shipping, the cost of the salads was really pretty high. Now, they do have an option where you can buy pods and create your own with seeds in order to keep the cost down, but we didn’t want to mess with that.

So, as we were moving things around during the remodel, I was also faced with the fact that the loft upstairs where we had the Aero Garden hadn’t been conducive to other plants for a couple of different reasons. In another “Aha!” moment, converting to flowers being grown in the Aero Garden seemed to make sense. It was a good idea, although interestingly, the flowers grow so tall that they bump against the lamp which is obviously not good for the blossoms. The solution to that is cut them and put them into a bud vase which then becomes the center piece for the dining table.