hey guys i'm janelle and i'm brad welcome to steamy vegan kitchen today's video is all about our honest review of our indoor hydroponic gardening system the eye harvest by indoor garden works we have had this bad boy for just over two years and we're really excited to finally share our thoughts about the whole experience of owning our own indoor garden so i'm gonna give you guys a really brief overview of how it all works how easy it is to use and how much we've enjoyed it and then i'm going to go over why you might
want to buy it so the pros versus maybe some of the reasons you might not want to buy so the cons and finally we're going to give you our final thoughts a lot of finality there and we're gonna go over four key categories to help you make your buying decision and those categories are the quality of the produce and how good it takes is it as good as the grocery stores number two we're going to talk about how easy it is to use and maintain so is it worth your time your investment of time and
learning about indoor hydroponic gardening talk all about that number three we're going to talk about the cost savings that you can expect and how long it's going to take you to make back your initial investment finally we're going to talk about the competition and whether this gives you more value than maybe some of the competitors out there so by the end of today's episode you'll have a pretty good idea of if hydroponic indoor gardening is for you and whether this system is the right system for you so stick around until the very end okay guys
so the super accelerated explanation of how it works is this grow your seeds in a growing medium put them in the net cup that comes with the eye harvest plunk that into the eye harvest add water to the basin with some nutrients turn on the lights set your timers for the lights and the water pump and sit back and watch it grow sounds really easy right it really is that easy every time we start planting new sprouts in the eye harvest we are able to start using our greens probably within about four to six weeks
which has been really awesome so that's it that's my quick overview of how to use the i harvest i hope you guys find that super easy and simple and now brad's gonna tell you guys some of the reasons that you might want to buy it hey guys so i have nine reasons of why it's a good idea for you to pick up and i harvest and then i have six reasons why you might wanna stay away from purchasing an eye harvest so let's get into my top nine reasons about why to buy one of these
number one it's organic produce with no pesticides yeah so i mean that's a big selling feature to eat more organic foods to be healthier you're gonna feel better it's just a no-brainer for us when we were making the decision it just made complete sense that we want to make sure that we're eating as much organic produce as possible and eliminating the pesticides from our diet which really leads us to the second big point which is the cost savings so as you know organic produce in the stores one of the big reasons i know why we
stay away from it sometimes is the price is so much more and so we'll sometimes opt for non-organic but with an eye harvest you don't have to worry about that because you're just buying the seeds you're growing everything it's going to be organic and you're going to save a ton of money that's a huge reason to buy one of these and in the long run you are gonna make that money back which we're gonna talk about later at the end of this episode the number three reason for us is the decrease in plastic so in
a lot of grocery stores these days they haven't especially during the pandemic they haven't been letting us use our cloth bags that we used to use we're kind of just starting again being able to use those but you know that's an important thing to us we're trying to decrease our plastic footprint like a lot of people that leads right into our next point which is it decreases helps to decrease your carbon footprint too absolutely and that's the number of trips that you're having to go to the grocery store when we had the eye harvest it
was just phenomenal we didn't have to drive as much to the grocery store while we're pretty close we decreased that part of the carbon footprint and that really actually also summed up tip number five which was it's a time saver which means you don't have to take as many trips to the grocery store which brad just talked about yeah yeah reason number six that you might want to get an eye harvest is that the produce you can grow is always so fresh it's never wilty like when you buy herbs and greens from a grocery store
they sit in your fridge for a few days and by the third or fourth day they've already started to wilt well we have never ever had that issue so far with the eye harvest everything that we cut off the eye harvest is always so fresh and crisp and delicious and it never gets you know wilty yeah it's nice it does have a bit of a different flavor than some of the stuff that you would get in the grocery stores and we'll talk about that later in the last kind of final thoughts on it as well
totally so let's talk about i think we're on to number seven now out of the nine benefits and that is that this one is kind of obvious but the irvist is so beautiful it's like a it's a statement it's a centerpiece for your whole home that your guests will definitely always want to talk about whenever they come over and it's always like wow what is this amazing thing you have in your kitchen and it's it's really cool it's like so beautifully designed honestly it is like a piece of living art and it's just so cool
i mean that's just the perk of having it at harvest number eight out of our nine is you get so much enjoyment from growing your own food it is so fulfilling and it is so satisfying to be sitting down eating a meal and you can go damn i grew this it's really awesome yeah it's kind of cool [Laughter] you're like i never have that feeling yeah and number nine our very last benefit about the eye harvest is really its size for us we live in a 1100 square foot townhouse and so we don't have a
lot of space we don't have a garden outside of our house where we can grow our own herbs and vegetables and our patio is actually really small as well so we wanted something that you know could fit on top of a countertop or fit kind of in the corner in our kitchen and we really found the perfect thing for our space you know in our scenario we had very little space in this alcove and it just fit perfectly for us and so it was just a no-brainer from a space standpoint uh in our scenario totally
so let's talk now about the six reasons why maybe you shouldn't buy an eye harvest so things are going to get a little more warm [Music] there are there are some reasons so you can see as we talk about it we're obviously very passionate and we really do love it but there are some things that we wish were a little bit better and there's there's some issues that you might run into so we're just giving you our honest thoughts on all this so first off number one the sound of the water pump can be kind
of loud same with the trickling noise of the water since the water pump feeds the water from the top of the eye harvest which trickles down to access all the roots to help it grow um there is inevitably going to be a trickling sound of water now i will say as the plants do start to grow the the the roots start to absorb a little bit of that sound and it does start to be a little bit more pleasant kind of like a waterfall very zen like but in the beginning it can be a little
bit loud it kind of sounds like someone is having a shower in our kitchen but that's only for when the pump is on and the pump is not on all the time usually we only have it on maybe for like 15 to 20 minutes every hour hour and a half depends on what stage of growing it's in the second reason why you may not want to buy the eye harvest is that there is the potential for it to attract pests like fruit flies and aphids now in the two and a half ish years that we've
had the eye harvest we've only ever had one serious issue with pests and i believe it was partially due to the type of growing medium that we were using which we don't use anymore but we felt that it attracted fruit flies we actually don't even really know what they were they're either fruit flies or aphids or thrips or something but we had a huge infestation on our eye harvest which unfortunately was unpleasant and we had to remove all of the plants we had growing inside of it which was kind of disappointing but it also was
in the peak of summer which is when bugs are more abundant unfortunately and so there i know are measures that you can take to prevent um pests getting into your pods and you know the plant areas but unfortunately it is a risk of you know getting yeah flies and i think i mean we were beginners when it comes to this stuff so we were learning and now that we're more aware and dialed in to how to prevent that uh it's much easier for us and there's lots of articles on the ig works site where you
can look this up to make sure that you're prepared before you get into it so i would say there's definitely some reading materials for it for sure and then our next one number three reason for why maybe you shouldn't buy an eye harvest is that if you travel a lot there might be some difficulties so for many years in my work i would be away for sometimes two to three weeks at a time and this is before we were married and everything at that time i wouldn't have bought one because you know i would be
having to have somebody come in and regularly check the nutrient levels that's something that you need to be looking at every four or five days especially in the early days and so if you have like a two week long trip where you're away that could be an issue for a lot of people you might only travel maybe two three four weeks out of the year and usually you're away for a week it's really not that big of a deal in that scenario yeah number four algae can get out of control pretty quickly on your pods
now to be honest algae is something that we've never actually really been able to get rid of or figure out how to control now albeit there are probably some resources out there that will give you some tips and tricks on how to reduce algae growing on your pods but unfortunately it's kind of unavoidable as algae grows when the conditions of moisture and light are present and this is pretty much a recipe for algae now with that being said we have found that algae hasn't really impacted the quality of the of the plants like it doesn't
creep up over the entire plant it just sits on the the pod itself and the water can turn a little bit green and kind of on the inside edges around the the inner basin but overall it hasn't been too much of an issue other than you know in the summer time it can give off a bit of a smell which kind of reminds me of how a fish tank smells okay number five is that you do have to clean it every six months so at that point usually you know you're at the end of the
cycle of your plants you're going to take them out you're going to clean out some of the roots you're going to dump the water basin inside and you're going to clean up the algae that is formed on the inside of the eye harvest it's pretty straightforward it takes about one to two hours we just take it out to our front driveway and hose it down and use some soap and just scrub it yeah give it a good scrub and that takes like i said just about one to two hours so it's not a big deal
it's pretty minimal but just expect that uh kind of ahead of time and then that brings us to number six our last con if you want to grow fruits and vegetables at the same time that you're growing leafy greens like lettuce and kale you're not going to have great results with one of those groups as they do require different kinds of nutrient levels so basically what that means is flowering plants like strawberries and beans and cucumbers will need higher nutrient levels than what is appropriate for leafy greens so you're just gonna have one group of
vegetables or or leafy greens that aren't gonna grow as great so there you go there's nine benefits for you about the things that we absolutely love and then six things which could be better and you know some of them we have to learn a little bit more about and i don't think you know when i weigh those you know the big question is would i still buy and i harvest and that really brings us to our last section here which which are the final thoughts about the eye harvest so the first thing is you know
when weighing the decision about whether or not to buy one is what is the quality of the actual produce like that's what you're probably wondering i've never actually had hydroponic produce before getting the eye harvest but i can say that you know after having it and trying it out it is actually even better than the stuff that i get in a grocery store now you get it fresh right off the eye harvest which is fantastic i don't have to use any kind of wilted veggies that are in my fridge i absolutely love the taste i
would say definitely a big plus for you when deciding to get one is about the quality the taste of the produce and i would say this is a huge winner so the number two thing when it comes to our final thoughts is really the ease of use so you kind of heard us say a few things in the pros and the cons overall about it and janelle explained how it worked you know overall i'd say there's a bit of a learning curve in the early we were beginners and you know we had to read a
bunch of blog posts about the different growing mediums and which one to use and then we tried different ones some of them worked well and some of them didn't and you know also when it comes to just sprouting stuff we had to learn all about that and it was actually kind of fun it was you know i'm thinking maybe about four or five hours you might have to invest in the early days to really learn about everything but once you do kind of that initial reading uh and a lot of those blog posts are right
on the iharvest ig works website uh you know you're pretty much set to go it's pretty straightforward to set up it's easy in that regards and you know once you're kind of up and going with your basic knowledge it's uh i'd say pretty easy so you don't have to worry and it was a big thing that we looked at in the early days when we were trying to make a decision because we've never ever grown anything hydroponically before but we're glad that we got one and i'm you know we're not looking back now we feel
like we're pretty much pros it's still a little bit still a little bit more that we have to learn for sure but anybody can do it if i can figure it out you can too okay so number three which you're probably wondering is the cost savings you know how long is it going to take me to make back everything that i invested up front so you know there's the upfront cost but then there's also the seeds and every once in a while you might need to replace a few neck cups here and there but overall
there's not really once you have it up and running there's not a huge like maintenance cost a lot of the nutrients uh really aren't that overly expensive the ph up and down aren't going to cost you a lot so energy efficient too yeah and that's the other thing i mean our hydro bills barely even went up i don't even notice a difference year over year when i compared them versus the prior year and so you know we're talking about a couple dollars really when it comes to hydro cost so you don't even have to worry
about that i know that's a big question on a lot of people's minds the lights because they're led really equate to just running a light bulb for 16 hours a day which is absolutely nothing so overall i would say we actually made back when we kind of costed out our veggies probably about it took a year and a half or so to make back kind of what we initially invested i'd say about a year and a half to two years roughly okay our last and final thought on the eye harvest is its value compared to
the competitors and how do you make that decision of this one versus the other ones so first and foremost we thought about how many pods do we need you know there's obviously nine pod ones like the aero garden that you put right on your countertop or you have ones like the eye harvest or the garden which is about g-a-r-d-y-n which have 30 pods so based on our diet we knew that we were going to do much better with something that had 30 pods we used so much produce in our cooking and all of our recipes
but it just made sense for us to choose something with a lot more pods now if you're someone who maybe doesn't have as much space and you want something on the countertop you might want to start off with something like the aero garden for example also if you don't have a diet that is heavy in produce and you don't eat a lot of salads maybe you don't make a lot of pesto and so basil might not be something that you're interested in then definitely start with something like an aerogarden but if you're a lot like
us or maybe you have a bigger household with kids and you think that you're going to use all 30 pods then this is definitely the option for you now the garden wasn't available at the time when we purchased the eye harvest but assessing it today i would actually still buy the eye harvest because some of the extra things that are in the garden i wouldn't even use like the app or the thing that checks the water levels because it only takes a second to actually pick up the front of the lid of the eye harvest
and check where you're at and i actually like that you're able to adjust the lights in terms of the distance from the eye harvest so i absolutely love the eye harvest for me i would choose it over the competition for our diet it makes sense you know overall weighing everything and after two years of having it i would definitely buy it again we absolutely love it and that really wraps up our in-depth review of the eye harvest if you liked this video and you stuck all the way to the end here thank you so much
you know don't forget to subscribe to this channel there are tons of recipes where you can actually see all the different things that we make with our eye harvest from pesto's to our smoothies that we make to our nourish bowls there's tons of recipes which janelle mostly does here and i occasionally make a guest appearance and other than that yes we have a coupon for you as well it's linked below in the video description check it out if you want to save a little bit of money if you decide to purchase an eye harvest and
don't forget here is a video right now for you that you can click and you can see the pesto that we make from the bed from the basil from the basil from the eye harvest click that video if you want to watch that recipe or maybe you want to check out the smoothies that we make and you can click this video right here super duper thanks for watching guys we'll see you in an upcoming video bye for now bye [Music] you
