Last winter, Plantoform’s intelligent internal garden has arrived at Brooklyn’s house. I was excited by the prospect of cultivating green leafy lettuce heads, channeling my interior Mark Watney, the left-left botanist in The Martian. Like many inhabitants of the apartments, I don’t have access to a courtyard garden and even if I did, it was below zero. The gigantic space egg cultivation system promised a low effort with high yields using the PlantAform Fogpontics innovative irrigation system.

Similar to airponic systems, in which the roots are suspended and sprayed with a spray rich in nutrients, Plantorm uses ultrasound fogger to generate the visible and nutritious fog “which hydrates the roots and plants, rather than traditional nozzles or sprinklers. At $ 750, the internal garden of Plantoform must not be confused with the table gardens that proliferate on Amazon, even if it is closer to those that competing at similar prices such as Gardyn OR Climb.

On your sign

Photography: Lisa Wood Shapiro

Billing as “the first intelligent internal garden to use the” innovative “fog technology”, Plantoform presents an omniscient app that guides your every move: when to remove the caps from pods of germinating plants, when filling the tanks and, above all, when to collect. There are no hypotheses and there are seven different plants packages to choose from: lettuce mix, cherry tomato mix, cocktail mixture, essential elements of herbs, leaf mixture, mixtures of edible flowers and mix of superfood salad that includes biella, bok choy and cabbage. At $ 29 in Box, the 15 pod kit looks like a more thin Kaurig capsules. Unfortunately, PlantAform growth cycles are unique for each kit, so tomatoes cannot be mixed with flowers or lettuce and so on.

It takes a lot of plastic to form the voluminous 2 -foot voluminous egg with a circumference difficult to hit over 70 inches. I wish you had wheels and handles. It took less than 50 minutes from the installation to the combination of the app, including assembly, collecting the nutrients of the plants in the jug, filling the tanks of lower and higher water, taking the pods of the plants in their respective holes and covering each pod with its germ coverage. Plantoform recommends using filtered water with distilled or inverse osmosis for the best results, since Plantoform has no internal filter. I went with the tap water. I live in New York City, known for some of the Best tap water in the United States. And while the photos on the PlantAform website made me think it was an airtight system, there are air intakes cut in the four adherent magnetic windows. I put the Plantoform in my children’s room. The app told me I was 45 days until the harvest.

Space to breathe

Fourteen of the 15 pods sprouted and after a few days, the app ordered me to remove germinating caps while entering its growth phase. The PlantAform requires 14 hours of straight LED cultivation time. When my son came home from college, I changed the times from 6 in the morning to start 8, so as not to wake him up. If you live in a study, the long cycle of light could be something to consider. At the beginning, everything seemed to go according to the plans. The app would have kept track of the days to the harvest and when I needed to fill the water tanks, which was not often.