Thursday, April 23, 2009

Coming soon to the Indoor Gardener...Aerogarden Snow Peas and Salads

Over the course of this blog, we've covered basil, herbs, cherry tomatoes, and romaine lettuce. The basil was an overwhelming success. The herbs yielded some great parsley plants. The cherry tomatoes were a little bit of a disappointment, as was the romaine lettuce. My beautiful indoor garden was then overrun by little critters.


Getting rid of the tomato plants seemed to get rid of the whiteflies, but I'm still paranoid that they'll be back. So my kitchen and the Aerogarden area is due for a top-to-bottom cleaning, and the kitchen window is going to stay closed.


But in the meantime, I went to the Aerogarden Outlet to try to find some seed packs on sale. I decided on these:


I'm most excited about the snow peas. I'm not holding out much hope for the baby greens or the mesclun after my experiences with the romaine lettuce, but if I can get just a few salads out of it, I'll consider it a success. As luck would have it, I recently started to try to lose weight with Nutrisystem diet, and one of the requirements of that diet is to eat lots of vegetables.

As Douglas MacArthur once said, "I shall return". Stay tuned!

Friday, April 10, 2009

Aerogarden Seed Starter Kit: Starting an Outdoor Garden Indoors

Hi everyone. As you know, I'm currently down to one Aerogarden that's only growing parsley(and the parsley is still growing strong, even with no nutrient tablets left). At some point in the spring or summer I'll restart the Aerogardens (and this blog), but for now, I figured we'll let it rest.

I did want to tell you about a pretty cool product that the makers of Aerogarden makes: the Seed Starter kit.

Back before I got into indoor gardening, I was an outdoor gardener. I loved starting my crops from seed. My dad always wondered why I bothered, when I could go to the local greenhouse and buy fully-grown plants. But there was always just something cool about starting a garden from a tiny seed, nuturing it as a seedling, climatizing it against the elements as a young plant, and then watching it mature and bear fruit. Starting from a plant always seemed like cheating to me :)

The problem I always had was that starting seedlings the traditional way was just too darned messy. I had Burpee Seed 'n' Start kits which were like ice cube trays, but even those got messy and often the seeds wouldn't sprout or the seedlings would die after attempting to weather them or if they were planted outside too early.

AeroGarden Garden Starter Tray (7-Pod & 6-Pod)
Well, Aerogarden has come up with a great solution, the
AeroGarden Garden Starter Tray (7-Pod & 6-Pod)
. This ingenious addition to your Aerogarden allows you to start up to 70 seedlings in the controlled environment of the Aerogarden.

Like any other Aerogarden plant, whatever you plant will grow fast, strong, and tall with the constant watering, the bright artificial sunlight, the optimal light cycles, and the nutrients. Unlike a regular Aerogarden, once your plants are of a large size and start to outgrow the unit, you can transplant them into your victory garden, where they'll continue to grow large and tall and give you a bountiful harvest in the Fall.

So if I had an outdoor garden, I'd definitely get this to start my garden. You can basically plant anything you can think of, and you'll be giving your plants the best possible chance to mature into full garden plants.