The AeroGarden

It’s been about a week now since I first planted the strawberry plants in the AeroGarden, I have been running on the suggested Herb/Basil setting and have yet to see any growth pushing it’s way up to the tray. However the root systems are developing nicely as you can see below.

I’ve refilled the water supply for the first time and so far everything appears healthy. I am just surprised at how much water these plants are soaking up, it’s nothing like any other AeroGarden seed kit or plant I’ve tried to grow before.

I recently noticed a lot of people are searching for good solid reviews of the the AeroGarden. So I put togather a page with some of the best and most balanced reviews I could find and put them up on the brand new AeroGarden Reviews page.

If you come across and good reviews that I have missed please comment and let me know. It’s actually surprisingly difficult to find reviews that have been published for the sake of helping people make a purchasing decision. The majority are done by sites actually selling the product and most of the rest are done by people trying to sell the product.

The AeroGarden Strawberry kit

The big difference between traditional seed kits and the strawberry kit is you receive real live plants as opposed to seeds. This means you’ll need to do just a little more work then normal when you first plant them.

What you Get:

• 7 Strawberry Plants - Sealed in a special bag.
• An official AeroGarden Strawberry planting, tending and harvesting guide.
• 24 nutrient tablets - These are special for the AeroGarden Strawberry kit and will last you 24 weeks.
• Finally…. The invoice.

When opening the bag for the first time I couldn’t help but notice that strawberry plants were a tad bit large for the bag, which made it difficult to cut open without damaging the leaves. So be careful as these kits are hard to come by!

The plant’s themselves are fairly easy to handle, simply take them out of the cut baggy and place them in your seed tray. It does seem a little different at first since the plants don’t use the “bio-dome” that the rest of the AeroGarden seed kits use. Also since these are live plants don’t leave them sitting idly on your desk, open and plant them in the AeroGarden as soon as possible.

Once you have all the plants nestled inside your AeroGarden, take a look at the root’s. We want to make sure that none of the roots are touching against any of the interior seams, if any are touching it’s quite easy to fix, just move them with your fingers. Once thats done you now have an AeroGarden full of (hopefully) growing strawberry plants!

One thing I should point out however is that AeroGrow has changed to a different breed of strawberries and so they are now reccomending that we DO NOT use the strawberry setting on the AeroGarden (oddly enough). Instead they recommend using the Herbs/Basil setting.

Whats the difference between the settings?

AeroGarden Strawberry Setting:
15 Hours Lights On (day)
9 Hours Lights Off (night)

AeroGarden Herbs/Basil Setting:
17 Hours Lights On (day)
7 Hours Lights Off (night)

So overall it’s an additional 2 hours of light, which should mean our plants grow faster. I will keep you all updated on my progress.

One question I get asked a lot from visiting friends and families is “How much hydro does the AeroGarden use?”. This is a perfectly understandable question, especially since electricity prices are going up and we are constantly being reminded to be more environmentally responsible.

Well to answer your question. Not very much, here in Canada I pay 8.7 cents per kilowatt hour (1000 kilowatts) during peak times and as low as 2.3 cents on weekends and during the night. So assuming you have an AeroGarden Classic, you are using up roughly 32 watts per hour, if you have the AeroGarden Deluxe or any of the more recent Pro models then you are using 64 watts per hour.

This breaks down to:

AeroGarden Classic : 31.25 hours of use for 8.7 cents of hydro (assuming maximum price)
AeroGarden Deluxe & Pro: 15.62 hours of use for 8.7 cents of hydro (also assuming maximum price)

For arguments sake let’s say your garden has it’s lights on for 13.75 hours a day, 365 days of the year. This gives us a total usage of 5018.75 hours. Ok, we’re almost done so don’t fall asleep on me yet!

The Classic model would use 160.6 kilowatt hours costing me $13.97
The Deluxe or Pro model’s would use 321.30 kilowatt hours costing me $27.95

Overall it’s not a very scary number.