This past winter, Plantaform’s new smart indoor garden arrived at my Brooklyn home. I was excited at the prospect of growing heads of leafy green lettuce, channeling my inner Mark Watney, the left-on-Mars botanist in The Martian. Like many apartment dwellers, I don’t have access to a backyard garden, and even if I did, it was below freezing outside. The giant, space-age-egg growing system promised low effort with high yields using Plantaform’s innovative fogponics watering system.
Similar to aeroponic systems, where roots are suspended and sprayed with a nutrient-rich spray, Plantaform employs ultrasonic foggers to generate the visible, “nutrient-rich” fog that hydrates the roots and plants, rather than traditional nozzles or sprinklers. At $750, Plantaform’s indoor garden is not to be confused with the tabletop gardens that proliferate on Amazon, even though it’s closer in size to those than similarly priced competitors like Gardyn or Rise.
On Your Mark
Photograph: Lisa Wood Shapiro
Billed as “the first smart indoor garden to use ‘innovative’ fog technology,” Plantaform features an omniscient app that guides your every move: when to take the caps off the germinating plant pods, when to refill the tanks, and most important, when to harvest. There’s no guesswork, and there are seven plant packs to choose from: lettuce mix, cherry tomato mix, cocktail mix, herb essentials, leafy mix, edible flowers mix, and superfood salad mix that includes chard, bok choy, and kale. At $29 a box, the 15-pod kit looks like a tray of thinner Keurig capsules. Unfortunately, Plantaform’s growing cycles are unique to each kit, so tomatoes cannot be mixed with flowers or lettuce and so on.
It takes a great deal of plastic to form the bulky 2-foot-tall egg with a difficult-to-grasp circumference of over 70 inches. I wish it had wheels and handles. It took less than 50 minutes from unboxing to pairing the app, including assembly, scooping the plant nutrients into the pitcher, filling the lower and upper water tanks, snapping the plant pods into their respective holes, and covering each pod with its germinating cover. Plantaform recommends using distilled or reverse osmosis filtered water for best results, as the Plantaform has no internal filter. I went with tap water. I live in New York City, known for some of the best tap water in the United States. And while photos on Plantaform’s website made me think it was an airtight system, there are air vents cut into the four loose-fitting magnetic windows. I placed the Plantaform in my sons’ room. The app told me I had 45 days till harvest.
Room to Breathe
Fourteen out of the 15 pods sprouted, and after a few days the app instructed me to remove the germinating caps as it entered its growing phase. The Plantaform requires 14 hours of straight LED grow-light time. When my son came home from college, I changed the timing from a 6 am start to 8 am start, so as not to wake him up. If you live in a studio, the long light cycle may be something to consider. At first, all seemed to be going according to plan. The app would keep track of days till harvest and when I needed to refill the water tanks, which wasn’t often.
Photograph: Lisa Wood Shapiro