The AeroGarden

Ever since purchasing my AeroGarden I have wondered about the 6 month recommendation. You see in the instruction guide we are instructed to change our grow bulbs every 6 months. Now that is perfectly reasonable but I couldn’t help but wonder if maybe they could be used longer.

Now before I continue I should warn you that I cannot guarantee that everyone will have the same results as I did so please don’t blame me if your plants are affected.

Well I did some research into the types of bulbs and how they are affected over time. It turns out that compact fluorescent bulbs generally last upwards of 15,000 hours and after 5 years output roughly 70-80% of the light they produced when they were first used.

So I decided to test this information out for myself, since my bulbs were already near the 6 month mark I simply left them in and made a weekly record of how my plants were behaving.

I can’t say I noticed any difference in my existing plants, however once I started with a new cherry tomato seed kit it did seem to take an extra week for the plant to start blossoming. Unfortunately when I was growing my first seed kit I didn’t think to keep careful notes so these results are very subjective.

Ultimately the cherry tomato plant’s grew well though the plant never seemed quite as fast growing, but the tomato’s don’t taste any different and the plants aren’t dieing. So I do believe you could use your AeroGarden grow bulbs for about a year without causing problems for your plants.

One way you can save a lot of money is to recycle your AeroGarden grow pods. It’s a very simple and easy way to avoid having to buy any additional items such as the “Master Gardener” 1 season kit.

Inside each grow pod is a special sponge; this sponge contains the seed and the nutrients to get the seed growing and to later provide a surface for the roots to grow into. Essentially the sponge replaces the soil in outdoor gardens.

While this sponge is very different from one you would buy at your local hardware store that doesn’t mean it’s not available if you do some digging. I came across a very interesting site called FutureGarden that sells a number of products which can be used instead of the much pricier official Aerogrow products.

You can see the Perfect Start sponges here.

Now what makes these so great is you can purchase these sponges for as little as $9.95 for 100 sponges, then buy your seeds at a local store for next to nothing and now instead of having to pay $19.95 plus shipping every 6 months to grow a new garden you can have several years worth of AeroGardening for under $25