As a kid, I couldn’t care any less about gardening. My grandfather had a green thumb and started a florist shop with his brother. My mum had learned from him and would be out gardening and I barely registered that she was in the dirt. As a young adult, I tried to keep a few plants alive in small dirt pots around my house but they would die on me constantly. I just couldn’t seem to figure it out.
When Kevin and I moved on from living with roommates we had a small garden space that I successfully had tomatoes and lettuce grow in during our first year of being there. Over the next decade, I struggled to get things to grow. The small plot was in the corner of the yard surrounded by trees, which made it rather shaded and full of tree roots. I was successful at getting something out of it every year but I had more luck with my planters than I ever did in the garden. Over time I figured it was my lack of consistent watering and the hate of getting my hands filthy in the dirt that stopped me from producing more plants.
Those of you who are befriended to me on the book of faces know that I’ve been posting about this awesome tower I have plants aeroponically growing inside my house. On the very last day of December, Kevin and I decided to purchase a Home Tower Garden from Juice Plus. We really want to promote healthy eating in our family and figured that the hydroponic tower would be a great way to do this as we could grow plants year-round inside our home.
It took a couple of weeks to arrive. I set it up (without the back-ordered lights), it came with everything we needed and was easy to do. There were instructions on how to put the tower together, but even without looking at them, I was able to get it all in the correct order. I decided that I would start some seedlings while we waited for the lights to arrive – between the kids and Atticus being curious we lost a bunch of the seedlings. But the day the lights arrived I moved them over to the tower with the lettuce we already had placed into the tower.
On February 26th, about a month after I placed my first set of seedlings into the tower, I decided it was time to plant more seeds. This time I remembered to take pictures of the process. The plants in the tower I had placed in too early but they were still growing well. We were able to eat the lettuce off of the plants that we had gotten from Urban Harvest while still growing our own. When the weather permits the plan is to take most of the calendula out of the tower and transplant them into the outdoor garden and at that point we will do another planting session.
I wanted to see what my one-week progress looked like and regretted not taking pictures when I first started planting. But decided that I’ll just take them from here on out and I can update you guys with them in a couple of months when the tower is looking fuller.