believe it or not what you're looking at right here is a garden and it's capable of growing over a hundred different types of flowers vegetables and herbs so in this video I'm going to go back to my roots in hydroponic gardening and see just how much produce I can grow in a vertical system about 12 years ago when I first started gardening one of my first systems I ever grew in looked much like this except for probably a little less fancy it was a 5 gallon bucket with water and something called an AirStone at the
bottom that would Bubble Up and I'd put one plant in it was a cucumber at the time and I would grow in what's called Hydroponics Hydro meaning water and ponos meaning labor and it's a method where the water does the work so this system here is called a garden who are the sponsors of today's video and they asked me to test this out grow it out and see what I could figure out so this is a hydroponic system and the way it works is there's a bunch of water down here you put nutrients in that
water and then a pump will actually bring water up here and it'll drop down and that water will run over the roots of all the plants that are growing in these little sections here there's just a few problems if you're growing plants in a system like this they don't have any soil I'm in my garage right now they don't have any light so you need to provide some light which this has right here there's two LED strips that blast light onto this section right here you need water which will be putting in you need nutrients
which will'll be putting in as well and those nutrients don't look the same as what you might see in an outdoor vegetable garden but most importantly you need the plants so I've got a selection of all sorts of different vegetables and herbs mostly greens and herbs and the reason why is because they grow really fast in a system like this and also they're quite expensive if you go to the store and try to buy some end dive you're probably looking at like $4 ahead and you can grow quite a bit of it in a system
like this so it's the most cost effective when growing in a hydroponic system and they just have these little cubes they're called y cubes I'm going to just pop them in there's a little bit of cardboard on the top to protect the seed and you just have to slot them in just like that so let's do it so I have all of my plants in I tried to space them out there's Swiss chard basil cilantro tatsoi bok choy all sorts of delicious stuff that is actually out in my soil Garden as well but now we
have the app which is really the brain of the operation so I can do some pretty cool stuff on here actually I can change the lighting if I want to I can check my water level but it also gives me what I need to do next and frankly I haven't done hydroponics in a while so I'm just going to follow it exactly as intended the first thing I have to do is check the replacement of all my cubes I already did that and then the next thing I need to do is actually fill it up
with water and the way that I do that is right here I have this little cover for this water I'm just using straight out of the city tap this is 5 gallons of water which is exactly how much this takes but I did let it sit for a while cuz water can have chlorine in it that's how it's treated when it comes from the city so I let this sit for about 24 hours to off gas all the chlorine it's a small thing from back in my old hydroponic days that you would do you don't
have to but I figured it'd be a good idea my water's in and you'll notice I didn't put any nutrients in there because these seeds need to sprout first so all they really need is for one watering cycle to wet this little Cube here which will wet the seed and start that process of germination so I'm going to turn that on it's actually really cool how this works the water will fall from the top of the column and it collects in this angled little pocket here so there's this little cylinder basein and then this is
the bottom of my Cube so when the roots Sprout they'll come out of this little medium here which is a rock wool medium they'll drop sort of into the bottom of this Basin and they'll sit in this nutrient-rich water and we're going to add those nutrients later on so I better get this one back in cuz I need to get it wet one thing I'm going to do is make sure I have some backups so there's actually this cool little sit on top system here that you can put some cubes in just in case you
don't get anything sprouting out of one of these cubes so I have a little backup system in place so I put a little water in the bottom of that it fits in really ni nicely you could of course just transplant in whatever seeds you want but using the cubes is frankly kind of convenient so those will soak water up from the bottom of the cube much like this setup and I'm going to put this little humidity Dome on top so who knows I might not have some of these Sprout I can just hot swap one
of those in but right now we just have to wait a couple days and see if we get something sprouting it's been about a week guys and I am pretty pleased with what I see so I've got germination on nearly every single growing site and I started these backups just in case I missed some so there's like two down here looks like my Italian parsley didn't want to sprout which is fine because I'll just put in some cilantro so it's kind of nice to have that backup but the Step we're at now is to inspect
see where the growth is at and also do what's called thinning out so let's take a look at this arugula right here there are a lot of seedlings in this little cell and if I pop out the actual Cube you can see some pretty nice Roots back in my Hydroponics days this is is what you would want to see some nice white clean looking roots with a lot of little branches going off here so this looks really healthy to me but what I need to do now is actually kill some of these plants so this
is too many arugula to be growing in one spot so I'm going to come through with My Little Snips and basically just select the one or two that look the absolute best and absolute healthiest so I'm going to come in and just it's a little brutal sorry guys so I've just cut off like five to seven of these and I've got one beautiful left right here take a look at that so now this goes back in the growing site and I do this over and over again one more note on this you'll know that you're
ready to start feeding your plants when you see the seed leaves they're the first leaves that come out they're going to look different than the leaves that come out after that which is called the first set of true leaves so you should at the very least see seed leaves showing up on all of your plants before you start feeding which I'm about to do but probably you could see see one set of true leaves and the seed leaves will start to yellow because effectively they just get used for early nutrition it's the first food source
for a lot of these seedlings so what I'm going to do now is I've got about 2 gallons of water I'm going to bust open the app and see what it tells me to do so it has me evaluating the plant's growth which I just did the root should be an inch long which you just saw the seed leaves should be starting to Yellow some of them are some of them aren't but it's in a good spot and I do have some true leaves on some of these so I'm going to go ahead and now
I've got 2 gallons of this mixture we hit complete so I have no room apparently I have 5 gallons of water in my tank so I need to I need to give it some time I guess I kind of want to feed it though right now because I feel like they would grow faster so I'm going to break the rules and what I'm going to do is extract some of this water mix up some nutrients for you guys and put some of that in so with a little magic I have removed a couple gallons from
the tank and the reason I did that is just I really want to speed the process up the roots are ready for nutrients so nutrients I will give them so you've got this little pack that comes with the kit I'm in San Diego California and our water is relatively hard water there's hard soft water hard water just means there's a lot of stuff in the water that isn't water it isn't H2O so the one I'm using is the veg and Bloom tap or hard water mixture and I'm just taking two teaspoons of it actually probably
just one teaspoon early on going to dump that in I might give it a little little taste something extra here that's all I really need here and then because I have hard water in hydroponic gardening which is what this is your pH of the water which is the acidity or alkalinity of the water it needs to be relatively acidic somewhere in the like 6ish range pure water is seven so I need to add something to this water to lower that pH so I'm going to add looks like about 2 tpoon of this thing called Hydro
Boost here which basically just makes it a more acidic mixture that's all we're really doing here so in that goes do that once a week I'll give this the old swirl and we'll top it off next thing it wants me to do is move any y cubes not ready for plant food to a nursery oh okay so basically it's saying if some of these are germinating slower like let's say my basil you can actually put them in this Nursery system here to let them wait and sort of age up until they get the roots and
the seed leaves that you want m pretty good so I'm going to leave it there and I'm going to hit complete on this task just crushing through the tasks on the Garden today very happy about that that should be it you're all caught up in today's tasks way to go and at this point we've thinned it out we've added nutrients we want to check in in like 5 days and see if we have some good growth it's been a few more weeks and I have to say I'm super pleased with what I'm seeing most of
the plants have grown out really well they're looking green so I'll share with you just from my experience some of the things you want to look for at this phase of growth first of all I want to look and see what's struggling is anything having a hard time and this little Swiss chart here does seem to be having a bit of a tough time but the roots look good I mean these are nice white Roots it's just kind of a little bit slow I am noticing that when a seed comes out there's something called a
Calon which is a seed leaf and it's the first leaves that come out sometimes the top of a seed can kind of get stuck to those calans right here so if you look at this there's just this little chard Leaf if I move that open maybe that stunted the growth I'm not really sure but sometimes you just get something that is not quite as vigorous now this is still going to grow it's still healthy so I'm not super concerned but the rest of these plants look very good so take a look at this guy right
here this is our green mustard so most of the root tissues is actually down in this little pocket with all the nutrients in there and this is growing really really well so I think important to analyze the roots do they look healthy number two and probably the biggest one is to look at the actual leaves themselves do they look good so do they look like they're supposed to look so when you take a look at let's say this lettuce here this basil this uh tat soy or even this guy over here I don't see any
deficiency symptoms what you might see is like a sort of like a yellowing on what are called the veins of these leaves here I don't see that I see a nice beautiful sort of lush dark green on this particular plant down here on the lettuce also the same and you also kind of want to look at the edges of the leaves and see if you see anything odd and I I kind of don't I mean these look quite good to me the one thing I will say is I noticed that there's a little bit of
what looks to be like a fertilizer salt buildup and that's these little crystals right here and I think that's coming from the fact that I may have slightly added a little too much fertilizer to this mix just cuz I really wanted to get these things growing I don't think it's a big deal it's not certainly not some like massive issue but it's kind of an interesting little thing because these are little crystallized fertilizer salts that I think have have sort of evaporated off and and hardened out so what I'm going to do now is I
checked the app I've used up about a gallon gallon and a half so I've mixed up a little bit more knowing that I have some of those fertilizer salt issues I didn't add too much extra fertilizer cuz the plants seem to be pretty healthy and remember when you're growing in a hydroponic style environment like this Garden system you actually can over fertilize your plants and do what's called burning so you can burn them and you'll start to see them kind of crisp up because they're getting fed too much so I definitely don't want to do
that but right now it's just a waiting game we're like probably a week away from a beautiful beautiful salad I have to say at this phase I'm pretty stoked I'm thinking back to when I first started gardening which was a hydroponic garden that I built myself out of like a little tote and I put it on a window sill and I grew like three or four herbs right if you scroll way back on the channel you can even see those videos if this thing was around back then I would have had 30 grow sites growing
pretty high value crops I mean growing fresh green mustard fresh basil tats soy Etc all those if you were to go to a farmers market and buy them at this level of quality it would actually be pretty expensive so I'm Stoke to see what it looks like in a few days it's been about 10 more days I'm pretty pleased with the growth that I'm seeing but there are a few things I wanted to highlight first of all this green mustard is on a life path that I don't want it to be on you'll notice this
one down here seems completely fine it's just leaves growing whereas this one has put out a flower stock or it's doing what's called bolting and I don't want that I want to eat the leaves of this mustard so when you see a plant do this what you can do is come down with your Snips and just cut off that flowering stock you could even use this this is great for little pops of color on a salad or something but for me I want to force this to put out more leaves but let's take a look
at the rest of the leaves just to see what's going on take a look at the lettuce here it's sizing up nicely I am seeing a little bit of Browning on these very low very old leaves so what I'll do is just clip those ones off because they're sort of on their way out anyways and you tend to see that even in a vegetable garden in soil on the lowest leaves of these leafy greens so it's not really something worried about but I want to see if I can get these just a bit bigger so
I'll check in with you guys in maybe 5 or 6 days we are back the garden is watering for its final cycle cuz I'm about to harvest and show you all the produce that we got but before I do a few thoughts on the system overall as someone who kind of grew up as a gardener with hydroponic gardening but has done a ton of inground soil gardening now number one is I think that I should have located the system a little bit closer to my house we're in my garage right now which is pretty far
actually away from my main Wi-Fi signal and so I found that the app which is very helpful if it is synced would desync sometimes and it's not that hard to get it rein to the system but if you didn't notice it for a few days all of the reminders in that Kelby system will seize to work and so I thought I had a full tank for about 3 or 4 days and it turns out it was actually almost empty and so you do see a little bit of yellowing on some of these leaves that I
could have fixed if it was closer to the house so I think most people who buy this are probably going to be putting it in their actual primary residence instead of in the garage my house is just too small to even fit it but that's something to think about another thing I'll say is the app itself is actually quite helpful if you don't know how to garden at all and don't want to fail it seems like that's pretty much what it is designed to prevent which makes total sense but I noticed in my case there
were some things that I changed based on my background in hydroponic gardening and soil gardening and just gardening in general like I started fertilizing these seedlings earlier than the garden system recommended and I think that kickstarted their growth but let's see what we actually have going on here now I could let this grow a little bit longer but I figured it was probably time to harvest so let's take a look at this guy here I'm actually really curious to see what the root system looks like oh my goodness that is a tank look at that
so you just do this and I think it's probably best to just Harvest off like this let's do that and clean that out later so I've got a little bit of green mustard here let's go with the tat soy that's a nice looking tat soy I have to say so out comes the tsoy it's like in that little exact shape of the Pod but the roots still look quite healthy you can see just how vigorous these roots are they would have wanted to keep growing down into the system and there's other systems like the tower
garden I used to use back in the day where the problem you'd run into is the roots would actually run down this entire thing and go into the bottom here and they start just totally taking it over so it seems like this system kind of prevents that let's grab that guy nice little mini tatsoi head I like that let's look at some herbs here I noticed my basil did not really blow up that much so let's see why that might be the case I mean The Roots the Roots look okay on one side not not
as okay on the other actually that's just from the thinning you can see some of those roots are are dead this would have kept going I think maybe if I was really going to keep the system going I would have left this basil and maybe done a pruning top right about there and then let this bush out a little bit longer basil you don't have to harvest all at once so maybe that's more of a cutting herb but just for the sake of this I wanted to cut it all off and just see the sheer
amount of produce that we have this kale is crazy I think I left some Roots behind there so this Kale's a little bit little bit stunted honestly little bit stunted it's definitely more of a baby kale than a a normal siiz kale but hey it is what it is I probably would just let this one keep going but then you have this like big old lettuce down here this is a nice size lettuce I'd say it's in the Adolescent stage it's it's not overgrown at all woo that's not bad it's actually really interesting to see
some of these plants going to bolt it's probably because they're in my garage and it's just a little bit hotter in here than normal cuz you've got these lights pushing out some light and heat on them but then they're also in probably a little bit hotter environment than they normally would be if it was in your house which is why you saw that mustard bolt you remember the other one bolted this one over here we pruned off but it looks like it wanted to go again but you can tell I mean this is still totally
iable for eating if you cut it off a couple times that's that's still good I would say I would have preferred it not to bolt but given that I was growing it in the garage it's not the end of the world it still tastes good okay let's harvest the rest and see what we got and then also see what's in the [Music] reservoir let's see what we have going on under here it looks like we don't have any of the roots getting down except for this one pod which looks like the cilantro so let me
pull that out cilantro has some really nice Roots but look at the difference between something growing sort of in the center of the tower where it doesn't have the ability to get down into that Reservoir and something that actually gets in you get these nice Pure White Roots big old cluster of them and the cilantro looked really really healthy and good so at this point obviously enjoy your produce but you got to reset this system and so the way to do that is to pull out all of these pop out the cubes the cubes actually
go away and then you'd reset with some more cubes and reset your system change your garden an app to note that you have a new start of watering date and you are off to the races with round two so what do I think of the garden system overall the engineering of it it's the best system I've seen from an actual design perspective I had some funky issues with the app I think most of that's due to the fact that I have it in my garage and not in my home but then you know for me
a hydroponic system like this isn't suited to my exact gardening goals like I have a big backyard now I have an orchard I have a pond P my space is not as limited as it once was the tower garden is the thing that was around back then and that one was exceptionally expensive very clunky and the cleanup and maintenance of it was actually a big pain I did not like it that much and that's why I stopped using it so for that reason I think this is a much improved vertical tower system if you're someone
who's limited on space and has the budget to afford it and wants to grow a lot of greens that's what I'd focus on I would not be growing stuff personally like tomatoes pepper cucumbers in a system like this I would be doing the stuff that you see here your leafy greens your herbs your cut and come again style basil Dill oregano thyme because those are really high value crops and they're very perishable and they're really so good when you eat them nice and fresh now would I have done a couple things differently in the grow
I think I would have I would have been a little bit more manual and not fully trusted the app just because of those sinking issues I probably missed one fertilization period which is why some of the plants look a little bit more yellowed than I'd like them to and they're a little bit smaller than I think they should be at this point in time so overall while I personally wouldn't use the garden system because I just don't have a personal need for this use case I do think it is the strongest vertical tower system that's
hydroponic that's kind of plug andplay for beginners that I've seen in quite some time little finicky in some parts but overall quite nice thanks them for sponsoring the video good luck in the garden let me know what you think down in the comments and keep on growing
