The past winter, Plantaform’s new smart interior garden arrives at my Brooklyn home. I was excited about the prospect of growing green leafy lettuce heads, which guided my heart Mark Watney Martian. Like many apartment residents, I can’t get into the backyard garden, even if I do, it’s under the freezing point outside. The huge, space-age growth system promises to use Plantaform’s innovative atomized watering system to reduce efforts with high yields.
Similar to the aviation system, where roots are suspended and sprayed with nutrient-rich sprays, Plantaform uses an ultrasonic mist to create a visible “nutritionally rich, nutrient-rich” mist that hydrates the roots and plants instead of traditional nozzles or sprinklers. Plantaform’s indoor garden, at $750, should not be confused with the overflowing desktop garden on Amazon, although it is closer to the scale than similarly priced competitors like Gardyn or Rise.
On your mark
Photo: Lisa Wood Shapiro
Called the “first smart indoor garden using ‘innovative’ fog technology, Plantaform has an omniscient app that guides your every move: when to remove the hat from the sprouted plant pods, when to fill the tank, and most importantly when to harvest. Without guessing, there are also seven plant packages to choose from: lettuce blend, cherry tomato blend, cocktail blend, vanilla essentials, leafy blend, edible flower blend and superfood salad blend, including dish, cocotta and kale and kale. The 15 revocation kit costs $29 and looks like a thinner keurig capsule. Unfortunately, Plantaform’s growth cycle is unique to each kit, so tomatoes cannot be mixed with flowers or lettuce, etc.
Form a bulky 2-foot-tall egg that is difficult to grasp over 70 inches of plastic. I wish it had wheels and handles. Less than 50 minutes from disassembly to pairing application, including assembly, scaling plant nutrients into the pitcher, filling the lower and upper water tanks, stuffing plant pods into their respective holes, and covering each pod with its sprouting cap. Plantaform recommends filtering water with distillation or reverse osmosis for best results, as the plant body does not have an internal filter. I went to the tap water. I live in New York City and am famous for some of the best tap water in the United States. While the photos on the Plantaform website make me think it’s a sealed system, there are vents cut in in the four loose magnetic windows. I put the plant in my son’s room. The app tells me that I have 45 days of harvest.
The space for breathing
Of the 15 pods, 14 sprouted, and a few days later, the app instructed me to remove the sprout cap when I entered the growth phase. Plant-based requires 14 hours of straight LED growth time. When my son came home from college, I started from 6am to 8am to avoid waking him up. If you live in a studio, you may consider long light cycles. At first, everything seemed to go as planned. The app tracks until the harvest days, which is not common when I need to refill the tank.
Photo: Lisa Wood Shapiro
