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Do These Indoor Gardens REALLY Work?
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May 21, 2024
There's an easy way to grow vegetables, even tomatoes, inside your house even in the winter. But how well do indoor hydroponic gardens really work? That's what I'll talk about in this video. Here are the gardens I showed in this video Gardyn 2.0: https://amzn.to/48lOQNj Click & Grow Starter Kit: https://amzn.to/3ZuN5th Aerogarden Harvest: https://amzn.to/3PjRhaJ Ahopegarden: https://amzn.to/45XmWpx Pantry Preparedness is a trademark of Income School LLC, an Idaho Limited Liability Company
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0:00
Last winter, I grew cherry tomatoes in Idaho in the winter
0:05
Let me show you how. So no, it was not some sort of magic, and it was not having a ton of grow lights or a greenhouse or anything special like that
0:15
It was actually just using some of these indoor garden setups that are hydroponic, very simple to use, and very small and self-contained
0:26
In fact, some of these kind of look kind of nice sitting on a kitchen counter
0:30
So today I want to share with you some of what I experienced, kind of the pros and cons, of these in general
0:36
Now, I've got three of them here in front of me today. I actually bought four indoor garden setups
0:41
The fourth one is from garden, and it's huge. It doesn't fit on my table here today, but I have it
0:45
And I'm going to talk about that one too. If you have any specific questions about any of these specific models, anything about them at all, the setup, how well they worked, cost any of those sorts of things
0:56
Let me know in the comments below. I'd be happy to make more content for you. well as in many cases, just reply directly to your questions in the comments
1:03
But for today, I just kind of want to talk more about the efficacy of using these
1:08
So, at a high level, here's how it worked. You guys are probably getting to know me a little bit by now
1:12
I really like to test things. So when I have an idea of something that I'd love to see how well it works, I don't often
1:19
just buy one. I like to buy multiple and then share with you what I observed having used all of these
1:25
And over the course of the winter, I used all of them, four of them
1:29
I had them set up in my home for a long time. It was kind of a fun like centerpiece for talking
1:36
It definitely started a lot of conversations. And I've had a lot of questions about this as people have come to visit
1:42
But the idea was to see just how much I'd be able to grow, how well they work
1:46
And just isn't something that makes any sense from a preparedness standpoint. So when we talk about preparedness, there are a lot of different aspects of it
1:53
There's emergency preparedness. So something bad happens. We have an emergency. We're not going to have our normal resources
1:59
We may or may not have to leave home. Even if we stay home, though, we may not have access to our normal utilities or our normal resources
2:07
Or we may not, as we discovered during COVID, we may not be allowed to leave our homes or we just may not be able to get the things we need to from the grocery store
2:15
And so there's that aspect of preparedness that's, you know, preparing for emergencies and what happens if we lose power
2:22
These don't really help you much there. If you lose power, these aren't going to do anything special
2:27
But there's the other aspect of preparedness, which is. is self-reliance. How do I take care of myself if I'm not able to just run to the store and get
2:33
everything that I need? And for that, I thought these could definitely make a lot of sense. So
2:40
let talk about what worked well and maybe what didn work so well in each of these gardens Some of what worked incredibly well was kind of my leafy greens These each came with a whole bunch of different leafy green options except this one This one didn actually come with any seeds
2:54
It just came with the little pods, and I got to put my own seeds in them, which was kind of cool
2:59
And I planted in them, of course, a bunch of leafy greens, but some other stuff too
3:03
In fact, I planted leafy greens. I planted a lot of herbs. I planted cherry tomatoes
3:08
and I planted peppers in kind of all of the different setups
3:12
And in this one, I even planted some wild strawberries. That was just one of the options on their website, and I love strawberries, and I wanted to see how it would turn out
3:20
I wouldn't recommend the wild strawberries mostly because the actual berries you get are so teeny tiny
3:25
They don't really do anything for you from a nutritional standpoint. These also have the option to be able to plant flowers in them, so if you just want them to be able to grow beautiful flowers and have a cool living flower arrangement in your home, that's cool too
3:37
But that's not so much what I'm doing because I'm focused on prepared
3:42
The leafy greens worked really well, and I liked having a variety of them
3:46
Now, I grew everything from kale to arugula to all sorts of other stuff I'd never tried before
3:51
In the end, my family didn't end up eating most of that. They're really healthy, but also really bitter tasting stuff, wasn't something that my family really adjusted to very well
4:02
But the more typical lettuces were things that we used all the time
4:06
And in fact, I had an overabundance. I've had more than I needed for my family of seven
4:12
Five of those are little kids, but we were specifically like, hey, I guess we're having chef's salad tonight for dinner because we need to use some of this lettuce. We got to cut it down
4:20
So it was really, really great for that. Now, that was in large part because I have all three of these and the big garden. And so we were getting a ton
4:28
But I think that even with just that garden or a couple of these, I could have easily produced plenty of greens for my family to be able to have the lettuce and stuff that we need all the time
4:38
So when it comes to leafy greens, check these are. fantastic. Let's talk next about herbs. We grew basil, we grew dill. We got a ton of dill
4:49
What else did we grow? We had mustard greens and so you could definitely also get mustard seeds out of it
4:54
I grew parsley. I grew thyme. So I grew a whole bunch of different herbs. For the herbs, I also found
4:59
that this worked incredibly well. In fact, one dill plant gave me more dill than I've probably
5:04
ever used in my entire life. And I had a few dill plants. And so I have quite a bit of dill
5:09
that I have dried out and then I've put it into a little jar. and that's pretty cool because now I have my own dill. Same thing with basil. I
5:17
dried out a bunch of basil because I was growing it a lot faster than I could use it. I also made a whole bunch of pesto which I was able to freeze so now we
5:25
have pesto available to use in the freezer. It really had a moment's notice. I can get
5:29
out some pesto let it thaw and it super good So for herbs I would say check These worked incredibly well And really I could recommend any of these but in another video maybe we can talk about
5:42
some of the benefits of each of the different ones that I've purchased and used
5:46
Now let's talk about tomatoes. These were able to grow cherry tomatoes pretty well
5:50
In fact, we were able to get quite a few cherry tomatoes off of them. My kids loved that
5:54
Some of my kids just love cherry tomatoes, and they'll pick them and eat them like fruit
5:58
It's not as much my thing, but they loved them. So that was pretty cool
6:02
And in fact, this click and grow system, one of the plants that they had available
6:06
was yellow cherry tomatoes, which was also kind of novel for my kids
6:10
So it was a lot of fun. It was also a lot of fun because it was novel
6:14
that we were growing these inside of our home, starting in the winter
6:18
But here was also the downside of tomatoes. It took a few months to really start getting
6:24
very many tomatoes at all. And even so, you can see here in this little clip
6:28
I wasn't getting a ton of tomatoes. Let's contrast that a little bit to this tomato plant that I have just in a pot out in my garden, a cherry tomato plant
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And this isn't even growing very well. Normally, our tomato plant is growing up and over the top and just going crazy
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But this is just what I grew this year. And this is after like a month and a half growing in this pot
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You can see the sort of difference in what you're able to get in terms of, my gosh, the word in my mind, the Portuguese word for it is there
6:58
Anyway, just in terms of the amount that I was able to get from this one plant is
7:05
dramatically more. And so when you're able to grow one plant and give it a big root
7:10
system, something like tomatoes is just going to do so much better if you give it that
7:14
room to grow. In these, you're not able to get a really big or deep root system. And
7:19
so the plants are always going to stay quite a bit smaller. So for tomatoes, you can
7:24
grow them. It's just probably not what I'm going to recommend. I'd recommend. I'd recommend
7:28
mostly sticking to your outdoor garden unless you just really want to be able to have
7:32
some fresh cherry tomatoes and I would probably only do cherry tomatoes
7:36
throughout the year even in the winter months. Next let's talk about peppers
7:41
I grew some bell peppers, some chilies in a few of these different systems
7:45
and I had a similar problem with the tomatoes. Because the root systems stay so small in these setups
7:52
they weren't able to, one, they weren't able to produce very big peppers
7:56
and so some of the bell peppers I got, I got, they were only about that big. I mean, they were very small bell peppers. It also
8:02
only produced a few bell peppers. Here's also the downside with these kind of fruits, the peppers
8:08
and the, I'm calling them fruits because they are botanically, but where basically they have
8:14
a little flower that then needs to be pollinated in order to get an actual plant that you can eat in order to get the actual fruit the pepper or the tomato And so what that meant was as those flowers started to appear I had to manually pollinate them Now I found one of the
8:30
easiest ways to do that. You could just kind of go tap on the flower and get that pollen to release
8:36
Actually, the easiest way was to get a little electric toothbrush. The buzzing on that is very
8:41
very similar to when a bee is buzzing and flapping its wings. And so it causes, you can visually see
8:48
when you're doing this. You can see the pollen cloud poof. And so we would just go in and tap each one of the
8:55
little flowers kind of on the outside with an electric toothbrush as it buzzed and voila. And we did buy
9:01
like its own electric toothbrush for this rather than using one of our own. But I just bought a cheap one
9:06
from the grocery store. It was like $4 for one of these kid electric toothbrushes. Still though
9:12
for the strawberries, the tomatoes and the peppers, the fruits ended up being so small
9:18
Even, I mean, self, like, pollinating them wasn't that big of a hassle, but the fruit was just so small
9:25
It seemed hardly worth it to take up space in one of these gardens trying to grow those
9:29
Meanwhile, outside I've got garden bed with eight pepper plants in it that's just given me so many peppers, huge peppers
9:36
And, you know, if I'm canning, which I do, I'm able to make salsa and all sorts of things out of those
9:41
Also, sometimes what we like to do is we like to just take onions or peppers, those kinds of things, and slice them, kind of like you would use them in, like you would use them in, like
9:48
like a fajita, and then you can even also kind of mince them, make them small if you want to
9:53
But then we'll just put those in a vacuum sealed bag and throw those in the freezer. And then they're just like ones you can buy at the store that are frozen, except they're fresh from our garden
10:00
So tomatoes, peppers, I'm going to go with no on those. I don't think it's probably that worth it
10:06
Again, unless you have the space and you have the money and you want one of these and you just really want to have some jerry tomatoes in the off season
10:12
Again, I'd love to share more about my experience growing with these. I'm actually about to start growing some more stuff, only this time I'm going to focus on most
10:18
mostly leafy greens and a little bit with herbs, the things that we're actually using in our home
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So I'm gonna be growing mostly just those sorts of things. And obviously I have tons to share
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So I'll be sharing that with friends and family too. And I do like the idea of being able to have
10:33
those fresh leafy greens year round. But I'd love to answer whatever questions you have
10:37
or just satisfy your curiosity if there's something that you wanna know about these indoor garden setups
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Let me know in the comments below. And I'd love to answer that. I'd also love to do any other testing
10:47
or answer any other questions related preparedness. So anything that you want to know or anything you'd love me to test out
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let me know in the comments because I'm all about helping you. And I hope to see you in our
10:57
next video
#Fruits & Vegetables
#Herbs & Spices