Oh where oh where is my Aerogarden Ultra?

Just wanted to write a post to let you know that no, I didn't fall off the face of the earth again! It's just that it's 24 days later and I haven't received my Aerogarden Ultra yet. The order I placed on November 1 still says "PROCESSING". Very curious. I did place another order today (for replacement pumps), so let's see if that order "bumps" my previous order and gets some action on it. By the way, if you're ordering from now until Monday, Aerogarden is still honoring their Black Friday sale, where you get free shipping on all orders and they have a Buy One Get One at 50% off on every item in the store. I ended up getting four replacement pumps for my Aerogarden 7s for about $7 a pump.

Aerogarden Ultra...the first new Aerogarden in years, and a good one!

Sorry for falling off the face of the earth since January. For those of you who were waiting to hear what happened to the lavender and the peppers, the lavender ended up growing really well and filled the house with a delightful lavender odor, but then I made the foolish decision to try to transplant them into pots, where they didn't survive for long. As for the peppers, I got harvest after harvest of them, but after a while I got a little absent-minded about watering them, and they pretty much dired up. Then, I got married which put a damper on all my blogging for a little while :)

That said, I'm officially dusting off this blog to report some exciting news from Aerogrow.

After years of living with the same old Aerogarden models, they've just announced a new one called Aerogarden Ultra.

This one looks really, really cool. It's got a digital display that tracks how long you need before feeding it (I admit, one of the biggest problems I had with my gardens was absent-mindedly forgetting to feed them). It also has a larger reservoir, better oxygen delivery to plants, a better trellis system, easier cleaning (another pet peeve of mine), and is the size of the Aerogarden Extra tall gardens.

It's no secret that Aerogarden has been struggling financially, but I look at this as a great improvement. I've placed my order for one of these gardens and will let you know what my experience is.

Here's the link to get yours! Aerogarden Ultra at AeroGarden.Com!

I placed an order for mine, and in 2013 will be reporting on whether this brand new high-tech Aerogarden is worth it, by going back to basics planting a classic set of herbs that I bought using the Make Your Own Herb Seed Kit feature on their Web site. It should be a good harvest this year! For those of you who are hanging on, stay tuned to some old school herb gardening!

Look at the Aerogarden Peppers!

Thought I'd share with you my Aerogarden peppers.

It looks like only the red peppers are blooming; the other surviving pepper plant isn't bearing any fruit, possibly because the red peppers are getting so big and sucking up all the water and nutrients. I find that the plant is sucking up water so fast that it's bone dry even before the "Add Water" light lights up, and the plant starts to wilt. Which is scary because I'm never sure if the plant has wilted beyond the point where it can come back.

I've already harvested a handful of the peppers, chopped them, and used them in some stir-fry dishes. They are really, really spicy, which I love. Let's hope this lasts!

In other news, the lavender plants are doing very, very well.

Still not quite like the purple fields of lavender I saw in Washington, but I figure there'll get there eventually. Although I still am at a loss to figure out what to do with them once I start harvesting them.

The grow-your-own-herbs are a different story.

As you can see, the basil seeds have sprouted amazingly well, not a surprise given my past experience with basil. The parsley is doing quite well too. And the thyme is slow to come up, but one little plant just came up.

On the negative side, the oregano and one of the thymes are having issues. With the oregano, I saw tiny little plants start to appear, but then they seemed to just die away, leaving behind some fuzz which I assume is mold of some kind. The other thyme did the same thing, which is weird because the seeds were exactly the same as the first thyme (let me just say a "no pun intended" for the whole post and get it over with :P). I'm not sure why these two pods just failed to grow. But luckily, I still have two "leftover" pods from the beginning, so I'll probably eventually replace these underperforming pods with those.

Now to find a recipe that uses basil, parsley, thyme, and lavender...hmm....

New Year, New Indoor Gardens

So, it's been a while since I had all three of my Aerogardens going. With the first day of winter happening four days ago, I figured, what better time to plant my gardens again?

I actually took advantage of some Special Offers that AeroGrow was offering over Christmas. I ended up ordering a few things from them: a new set of grow lights and three seed kits.

For the sale, I had to choose from their pre-packaged (non-custom) kits. I've always wanted to try growing lavender, so that was the first kit I ordered. In all honesty, I'm not sure what I'm going to do with lavender if it grows, but it's just something I've always wanted to grow ever since taking a trip to Washington.

I also wanted herb kits, of course, but I'm not a huge fan of their selection--while their Gourmet Herb Seed Kit (6/7-Pod) used to contain herbs I use like cilantro, parsley, and sage, now it contains things I never use like dill and lemon basil. And of course, if you look back on this blog you'll see that I pretty much exhausted things you can do with mint.

It's then when I remembered that years ago I'd ordered a (non-Aerogarden) herb kit that I never used. I looked through my stuff and surely enough, I found a couple bags of seed I never used.

I ended up getting two of the Grow Anything 1-Season Kit (6/7-Pod). Will my seeds still grow after all these years? That's the million dollar question. Supposedly, seeds will last for years and years when stored in dry and temperate conditions (I had inadvertently stored mine in the perfect conditions, as I dug them up under piles and piles of clutter). The seeds I had happened to be ones I use: basil, parsley, thyme, and oregano. I had chive seeds too, which I don't use too much.

And so I figured I'd do the experiment of the century: could the Aerogarden Grow Anything kit grow herbs seeds that I'd given up for lost? We'll see in a few weeks.

The Grow Anything kit was pretty impressive. I was wondering--why should I pay the same amount ($17.95) for a kit that has NO seeds as I would for a kit that HAS seeds? The answer wasn't clear on their Web site, but was clear as soon as I opened the package.

The kit comes with 7 empty plastic baskets. They're supposed to be split-apart baskets for easy transplanting later, but the ones I got were definitely in one piece.

They also come with grow sponges, which have the look and consistency of soil much more than I remember. They have a little indentation on the top into which you can drop your seeds. And of course, they have those plastic "grow domes" that you put over the seeds as they're germinating.

They also come with 16 5.5mL nutrient packages and 9 8mL packets. That's a lot more than comes with a standard seed kit (my lavender kit only had 8 8mL packets). So for the same price, instead of seeds, they basically make up the difference by including 8 more weeks of feeding.

My silver Aerogarden was still clean and the brass contacts weren't too corroded on the pump or the arm yet, so the pump still worked.

I took a seed bag and generously poured seeds into the grow pods.

I figured I'd load up the seeds--this way there's a better chance of one sprouting, and if all of them sprout, I'll just prune them down to one or two plants.

I put all seven seed pods in (one parsley, two thyme, two oregano, and two basils). I turned on the unit and most of the pods were soaking up the water.

I saw most because I noticed the two pods on the extremely left and right of the unit weren't.

The problem seems to be with the design of the pods. While they're supposedly compatible with all Aerogarden units, my old 7-pod classic clearly didn't like the longer length of the newer seed pods (which work find in newer Aerogardens).

So, I decided to take out the seed pods on the edges (a basil and an oregano) and save them for some other time. I found some old Plant Spacers to put in their place.

The package also comes with labels you put on top of the baskets. The instructions actually said that to affix the labels to the plastic baskets, you should use a hot iron! I had no inclination to burn myself or some hot plastic with an iron, so I decided to just place the label on top and put the grow dome over it (it is important to use the label to regulate the light that gets to the grow dome).

So, we'll see if I have herb plants in a few weeks, or just some moist grow sponges (in which case I'll plan on reusing them and buying some seeds from my local gardening store.

In other news, I planted the lavender plants too.

This was a lot easier and more straightforward than the Grow Anything kit. I just had to pop it into one of my old black Aerogardens, which thankfully was also clean and working.

We have Chili Peppers!

For those of who who follow this blog, no, I haven't forgotten about you (or my indoor garden). It's just that my chili plants seemed to be taking forever to grow chilis. Of course, it didn't help that I constantly forgot to water them :P

Happily, my Aerogarden Extra (formerly known as my VeggiePro) is raised all the way to the top with the two remaining chili plants.

In fact, the two plants had grown so much that I had to chop off the entire top, which was growing into the grow lights. The result was this lovely bouquet, suitable for a blushing bride.

Lo and behold, after what seems like an eternity, there are some beautiful peppers on the tree like Christmas lights. Here's a bunch of them.

Here's an especially pretty one:

Now...off to look for some chili recipes. Anyone have any suggestions?

A bit of a roadblock

So, my pepper plants had been doing very, very well. The early pruning turned out great, as my four pepper plants grew stronger than ever, avoiding the "top heaviness" that doomed my last batch.

When I checked the plants the other day, though, I was horrified to see that the leaves were wilting.

I realized what had happened. The plants had grown so fast that they sucked the water all up, until it was bone dry. And it all happened so fast the "Water Low" indicator didn't even have time to light up.

I quickly filled the basin with water, but it seems the damage had been done. On two of the plants, the leaves had already wilted past the point of being salvagable. Strangely, the other two plants were doing just fine. My guess is that these two plants had sucked all the water for themselves, leaving their brethren parched.

I plucked all the dead leaves off, but I noticed that there were still tiny little leaf growths on a few of the joints of the branches trying their best to pop up. So I gave the plants a huge pruning, cutting off the branches with the dead and dying leaves. This left me with a couple sticks:

I poured all the water out and refreshed it with clean, warm water and fresh nutrients. The lesson learned, of course, is not to rely on the low water indicator, and to remember the check the water daily when the plants start getting big. I also noticed that the airstone wasn't really aerating the water very well, so I replaced that too.

We'll see if the little guys have some resilience after almost dying of thirst!

Growing Aerogarden Chili Peppers "By the Book" this time

I'm happy to report the indoor chilis are doing pretty well.

Having said that, a lesson I learned quite clearly from last time is to do it "by the book"...literally. Last time, I let the pepper plants grow and neglected to prune them, which resulted in a bunch of top-heavy plants that ended up collapsing.

This time, I took the instructions to heart. First, I thinned out the plants so that each pod only had one plant. Of course, this meant chopping off one and in some cases two very healthy plants to allow their stronger sibling to take over the whole pod.

As hard as it was to do that, the harder part came in the next step, where for each of the four remaining plants, I had to chop off all the growth over the third "stem".

This was especially hard, since the plants looked so healthy and one even started to have little flowers on them! But again, learning from the last time it's important to make sure the base of the plant is strong. In some ways, pruning the plant like this is a lot like bonsai--on an outdoor plant you'd let it grow and grow, but indoors you need to shape it so that it grows to proportions that work indoors.

Here are how my trimmed plants look now:

In other news, I am on the cusp of officially retiring my other Aerogarden, which was still hanging on with one parsley plant and one basil plant. In an odd turn of events, I noticed that the plants were dying and that strangely there was a ton of dried gunk caked-on the front of the Aerogarden unit. I realized that the pump had failed and somehow the minerals in the nutrients were evaporating and forming on the outside and by the pod openings. When I examined the unit, the contacts on the arm that connect to the pump had completely oxidized.

I transplanted the parsley into a pot. As for the basil, it's not in great shape so I figure I'll let it ride in the Aerogarden (which I got the pump working for again) a few more weeks and see what happens.