Tomato plants getting bigger on the VeggiePro.

Well, two weeks have passed, and take a look at the VeggiePro now.

I count a total of about 6-8 full tomatoes. As someone who used to grow tomatoes outdoors, I can definitely see that the tomatoes would definitely do much better if they were outdoors and not bunched together like this. On the other hand, what a thrill it is to have living tomatoes in the month of December when the temperature is 18 degrees outside!

The Aerogarden Veggiepro hood is officially raised as high as it'll go. The larger plant is close to hitting against the hood, so chances are I'll have to prune it (although I'd hate to, as there are several flowers on that stalk). This larger plant is the one that has the most tomato growth.

I have to say I'm still disappointed with the second plant, though. It's grown large but it was yet to produce flowers that don't fall off immediately; I'm guessing there was definitely something wrong with this batch of seeds. To Aerogrow's credit, they did send me a replacement pod, but I'll keep this original plant going just to see if anything will come of it, and then at some point I'll plant the new pod.

In the meantime, the one plant has all but spread out the entire unit, so I'm not disappointed.

As each week goes by, I'm doing quite a bit of pruning. Of course, any leaves that grow too far out of the light get cut, as well as leaves which turn brown or spotty because they're being covered up. I'm also cutting off some of the larger branches that are clearly not producing flowers or fruit, in order to let more water and nutrients go to the tomatoes.

Something else I've been doing every few days is filling up the unit with water. This thing drinks water at an amazing pace.

As branches have gotten big and flopped toward the ground, I've been using the trellis system that was provided with the VeggiePro. Right now I have three of them supporting the branches, all of which are now producing fruit, some large, and some tiny ones like these cute little guys.

Hopefully in a few weeks I'll have the first fruits to show you. Stay tuned!

Welcome to the jungle!

(with apologies to Guns N' Roses)

That's right, the two tomato plants are officially gigantic now. The VeggiePro is officially extended all the way it goes. I have still been pruning the parts of the plants that grow outside the grow light area, and I'm now filling the water up about once every two days; the plants are drinking up the water that quickly. I just added two more nutrient tablets too, and of course I'm pollinating the flowers every couple of days too.

So the burning question is...are there tomatoes? Well, take a look:

In total, I count about 10 tomatoes so far on the plant. The biggest two are slightly bigger than cherry tomato size, well on their way of being full-grown heirloom tomato size. There are about five in this picture alone.

Unfortunately, all is not well. I notice there are a LOT of flowers that simply grow weak and fall off. I'm a bit confused as to why this is happening.

Still, as long as I have some flowers that stay on the vine and grow into tomatoes, I'll be satisfied.

One very nice thing about the VeggiePro is that it comes complete with a trellis system, something that previously had been an additional cost. The Trellis system is basically two pieces of plastic you connect to the top of the unit (conveniently, the screws are already there, you just slip the plastic on and tighten the screws).

Here's what it looks like when it's complete:

The system comes with a retractable cord with a plastic snap on the end. Here, you can see me holding up the large plant with one of the cords. As the tomatoes grow larger, this will hopefully stop the plant from snapping and collapsing from the tomatoes' weight.

Not sure how much longer before I'll have tasty tomatoes to enjoy, but you'll be the first to know! :)

Special Deal at Aerogarden.Com

If you've been on the fence about buying an Aerogarden, there's a great deal going on. But you have to be quick--the deal ends at the end of the day Monday

It's called 33% off 3 Gardens, 3 Days Only, and it'll let you purchase

Aerogarden 3 Elite for $79.95 ($50 off)

Aerogarden 6 Elite for $119.95 ($60 off)

Aerogarden Classic (7 pod) for $99.95 ($50 off)

These are probably among the cheapest prices you'll find on the Web for a brand new Aerogarden (Amazon is about $30-$50 more). All the units, of course, come with an herb kit. Great time to stock up for Christmas presents--there are few better presents you can get for the gardener or chef in your life

In other news, interesting developments with my tomatoes. I'll post an update soon! :)

Aerogarden Liquid Nutrients - Coming soon to an Aerogarden near you

2010 Update: Liquid Nutrients are now available in the Aerogarden Store

While I was corresponding with Aerogarden about the slow start of my tomatoes, John at Aerogarden was kind enough to write to me directly. He gave me some good advice that sometimes cold temperature can affect how quickly the seeds germinate and sprout. I expressed that I was still concerned at the very slow start of my second tomato plant, and he was gracious enough to send me a new seed pod (although, as he predicted, I wouldn't need it, as the second plant finally did grow to be strong, albeit several weeks after it probably should have).

John was also kind enough to include in the shipment something a sneak peek into to something neat that Aerogrow is working on. I think it'll will be a huge improvement when it's officially released (he said it'd be sometime in November).

These are new Aerogarden liquid nutrients.
For those of you who have had multiple Aerogardens like me, you'll know that the nutrient tablets, while cool in a "plop plop fizz fizz" kind of way, do have their drawacks. Opening the packets can be difficult, sometimes the tablets crumble inside the packets because of excessive moisture, sometimes the tablets don't seem to dissolve evenly enough, and often, you can see white specks in and around the Aerogarden unit from the residue of the dust.

I'll show you a demonstration of the liquid nutrients, with the disclaimer that it's not clear when these will be available on the Aerogarden store (may be as early as later this month). But they're so cool I wanted to give you a sneak peek.

The packets sort of look like duck sauce packets that you might find in a Chinese restaurant. Inside is a brown liquid which I assume contains the same rich nutrients found in the tablet.

When the two week "Add Nutrient" light add us, instead of using the tablets, I'd instead open a packet and pour the contents in.

Voila, that's it. Helped by the water pump inside, the nutrients spread evenly throughout the bowl. It's quicker, easier, and more effective.

So look out for these in the coming months on the Aerogarden store. I'll also post a link on this blog once they're available.

One interesting development this week. While I was shaking the first big tomato plant to pollinate it, I was disappointed to see one of the yellow flowers fly off. That is, until I looked more closely at the plant where the flower fell off!

Tomato Flowers on the VeggiePro!

Looks like the first plant is making some real progress. Over the last week, a bunch of flowers sprouted. In total, I count about 20 of them!

Now, as far as whether they'll actually turn into 20 tomatoes, that's something we'll find out in time. But following the instructions in the manual, I dutifully shook the stalks to pollinate them. Something I learned with my cherry tomatoes many moons ago was to not only shake them, but to use my finger to "tap" the thickest part of the stalk where the flowers are growing from.

The VeggiePro is definitely gulping up the water--I need to refill the reservoir every couple of days now, and I'm still pruning leaves that grow too far outside the light. The plants are tall and aren't stopping. I'd say it's probably a few more days before I lift the lamp arm one more notch.

Anyway, just wanted to update you on the progress. More soon.

Six weeks into the VeggiePro, it looks like we're getting somewhere

Here's what the plants look like this week.

As you can see, the plant to the right has grown like wildfire since the last update. In fact, the leaves are growing so that they stretch outside of the lights.

The plant to the left has grown surprisingly impressively as well, much more than I expected.

The VeggiePro manual gives instructions to prune the tomato plants after four or five weeks, specifically, to chop off everything that is growing above the first five branches. Since it's been over weeks and the plant doesn't even have five main branches yet, I'll be disregarding this initial pruning and instead skipping ahead to the section titled "ongoing pruning". The instructions here say to cut off leaves that are growing outside the Lamp Hood's lights. Indeed, I noticed that leaves which the lights weren't reaching were growing brown. No use in using up the precious nutrients on leaves that'll never produce fruit.

After pruning, the floor looked like what our kitchen floor used to look like when my dad used to give me haircuts as a kid.

And look at how well-manicured the tomato plant is. Makes me want to go into bonsai. If you click on the photo and take a close look, you'll see that there are even little flower buds starting to form. I've got a good feeling about this. For good measure, I even started hand-pollinating the plants, again from the instruction manual of the VeggiePro.

As you can see, I've been raising the lamp arm to accomodate new growth of the bigger plant, and have been dutifully refilling the water (which now needs refilling once every few days thanks to an impressive root system starting to form and take in the water and nutrients). Having been somewhat burned already by the cherry tomato experience of a few months ago, I'm not getting too excited yet, but after a shaky start, the plants are definitely doing much better.

A tale of two tomato plants

It's now a complete month since I planted my Aerogarden VeggiePro. Take a look at what's happened to the first of the two tomato plants:

After a shaky start and a little bit of the nudging as I described in the last post, it looks like the first tomato plants are finally making some progress. In total, three plants showed up, one anemic one, but two fairly strong ones. The plants still are very, very much behind what the instruction manual says I should see at this point in time--the manual says that at 4-5 weeks the plants should be extremely thick and ready for pruning. As you can see, the plants are nowhere close to that, but at least they're in the game now.

Since the two "good" plants were about 1-2 inches now, per the instruction manual I took some scissors and thinned them to all but one plant. The one weak plant was easy to get rid of, but it was hard deciding which of the two healthy plants to chop. I chose the one with the slightly thicker stalk and more leaves.

Now for the bad news. The other pod is still extremely disappointing. The very first seed that sprouted is completely dead now. Three others have sprouted. One of them is barely an eighth of an inch tall, and another is about half an inch. In both cases (the same as with the first doomed stalk that came up), the seed outer "shell" portion never came off but stayed stuck to the top of the stalk. I'm no agriculturalist, but I get the sense that this means the plant is not getting the needed light it needs to grow.

In the case of the fourth plant, the seed outer shell finally did come off, but very, very late, which I'm guessing led to the stunted growth you see below. This is after 4-5 weeks, and this, the tallest plant, has a tiny amount of malformed leaves and is not even 1 inch tall. Terribly disappointing.

I'll be contacting Aerogrow this week to explain and to see if they'll send a replacement for the second tomato pod, as this seems highly unusual. I'll let you know what they say.

In all, not a very auspicious start for the VeggiePro. The plants are not growing close to the pace that was suggested on the pod or in the manual, plants are growing under the paper shield, plants are growing stunted.