The kitchen garden goes high tech

If you have always wanted to grow your own food but lack the expertise or outdoor space to do it, a high-tech indoor garden may be the answer.

Various startup companies now offer a bumper crop of garden gadgets to make it easier to grow food in your home.

CounterCrop and Niwa offer a wired step up from a window planter box - no dirt or green thumb needed. Each device lets you plant and grow a small crop of fresh vegetables.

CounterCrop is a self-contained, miniature garden with its own watering setup and advanced LED lights that mimic sunrise, sunset and seasonal shifts in nature. It’s nearly 2 feet long, 1 foot wide, and takes up the same amount of space as a medium-size microwave oven.

To get things growing, simply plant some seeds in any or all of the 50 dirt-free growing pods. Salad greens, kale, herbs, mini-tomatoes, beets and radishes work best. Add plant food and water to the base. It comes with a remote control loaded with programmed settings, so it can handle the lights and watering cycles with little effort.

CounterCrop promises full plants in a month or less. The downside is that it’s a new product, so it’s not well tested in the real world. CounterCrop was funded by a Kickstarter campaign and created by engineers and horticulture scientists at Intelligent Light Source, which makes indoor growth lights for plants. The first units will be shipped in June.

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Niwa takes a similar approach, but the mini-greenhouse looks more like a modern, luxury end table, with plants growing inside.

Water, soil and adequate light are the basic formula for virtually every type of plant, but the subtle nuances among species is where home growers are so often tripped up. The Niwa founder and chief executive, Javier Morillas, says his device has the “brain” of an experienced farmer, with the “guts” of an ultrahigh-tech gadget that can turn decades of growing expertise into an automated game plan that anyone can use. A tomato plant and a head of lettuce may need the same ingredients to grow, but only an experienced grower can coax the most out of both.

In that way, Morillas says, Niwa’s combination of fans, grow lights, sprinklers and sensors is the ultimate gardening guru. People just decide which seeds to plant, drop them into a hydroponic base that uses mineral solutions instead of soil, and let the device pick up from there.

A connected smartphone app asks what kinds of plants you’re growing and then plugs in a formula tailored to your garden. Niwa takes care of the watering routine and lighting schedule and keeps the humidity and temperature in check. Along the way, the Niwa app will ask that you check the plants and answer a few questions, such as how much growth has occurred. This information helps Niwa plot the progress of your garden in the app and further dial in its settings, ideally giving your plants the opportunity to flourish. The company expects to start shipping the first units by early summer.

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For now, it comes in two sizes, with the smaller standing about 2 feet tall, and the largest a little less than 3 feet. A premium version of the larger unit gives you a choice between aluminum or plastic poles framing the four-sided, see-through plexiglass container.

Other options include ClicknGrow, which offers several breadbox-size containers wired to grow small batches of herbs, strawberries, chili peppers or other plants. Early next year, it is releasing a larger-scale option that will let people grow 50 to 250 plants inside their homes.

The Miracle-Gro AeroGarden uses aeroponics to grow plants with air or mist instead of soil. This automated indoor kitchen garden places plants’ root system in a 100 percent humid, oxygenated, nutrient-rich growing chamber.

For people with no counter space to spare,  Windowfarms uses a hybrid hydroponics approach to grow up instead of out. You can order a single column of four vertically hanging pots and the watering system base. From there, growers can take a subscription box approach, getting fresh starter plants delivered to their doorstep as often as once a month.

Of course, people don’t need technology to grow their own food. Urban gardeners have used cheap plastic gardening plates, pots and even casserole dishes to grow herbs and other foods. Books like “Indoor Kitchen Gardening: Turn Your Home Into a Year-Round Vegetable Garden” (Cool Springs Press) offer low-tech solutions for people who are willing to spend time, and a lot less money, on an indoor garden.

© 2015 New York Times News Service

18-05-2015