The plants in this hydroponic garden grow directly in water… with no soil. Every two weeks, the little green light on the bottom turns red to remind you to put two capfulls of plant food into the water. Other than that, you just top off the distilled water each day, and you get lucious herbs. Simple.
My husband got me this one from Costco, but you can get them various places and under different brands. What they have in common is that they have pods that you place into the water. These pods contain seeds which germinate when placed in water under a grow light. The grow light on this model (Aerogarden) is adjustable. You place it lower when the seeds are germinating, and as they grow taller, you raise the light higher.
How to Set Up Your Hydroponic Garden
Here is a tutorial on how to use your hydroponic herb garden:
As you can see, you fill the container with distilled water, so as not to crust over the system with harsh chemicals from tapwater. Then put the lid on, and place the herb pods into the circles.
Place the little “greenhouse” over each pod until they sprout. Then remove the “greenhouse,” allowing the plant to grow taller.
When the herbs are so tall that they touch the light, they need to be trimmed or transplanted to another container or outside.
So far we have grown herbs (including basil, parsley, and mint) and some cherry tomatoes. It’s fun to add some greenery to your home, and to have herbs available to clipping and throw into your cooking!
It’s been a while since I’ve started vegetables from seeds, so I thought I would try it again this year. We planted these back in March, so now that it’s May, we have transplanted the seedlings outside. We filmed the entire process, giving tips along the way. Make sure to check your weather forecast to make sure that it will not freeze overnight in your area before transporting the plants outside.
I show you in this video the whole process of starting vegetables from seeds:
We planted the seeds in seed trays, using seed starting mix instead of regular soil, because the seed starting mix keeps moist better. You can use old yogurt containers or other small containers instead of seed trays.
Make sure to have a grow light, which has the full spectrum of sunlight so that the seeds can get off to a good start. Otherwise you can place them in a sunny window.
Put cellophane over the rows of seeds, to keep the seeds moist and to cut down on the amount of times you need to water them.
Use a spray bottle to water, so that the seeds don’t get washed away.
Some seeds grow faster than others. Some take a few weeks to germinate. As you can see in the video, the green bean plant sprouted high above the others, reminding me of the Jack and the Beanstalk story!
Starting Vegetables from Seeds (video tutorial)
After a couple of months, you will want to transplant the seedlings outside. Some of the plants were getting too tall for the grow light, but the frost outdoors hadn’t passed yet, so I just transplanted the taller seedlings into larger containers and placed them in a sunny window.
I have a raised garden bed in partial shade, so I chose veggies that like the shade, such as lettuce and spinach, to plant in it. Then I set up a trellis next to my house, and I planted the climbing varieties of vegetables along the trellis. Green beans, for example, need a structure to climb up. You might want to stake those up with a wooden shishkabob skewer like I did in the house in the sunny window, using a twist tie to make sure they don’t fall over.
Growing your own vegetables is a great way to eat healthier and tastier food. I will be growing an even larger vegetable garden next year!
How would you like to create a backyard oasis? Everyone needs more of nature, and gardening is calming for your body and mind. When you sit on your porch, what do you see? With a little effort and a few tips, I will show you how to improve your outdoor space.
Gardening: Your Backyard Oasis (video demonstration)
Make a beautiful haven where you can sit and pray or think about life, and get away from it all. I started filming this video near the end of April, and now it’s the end of May. So I show the progression of the backyard, awakening from the winter, and blooming into the spring and summer.
We also hung lights around the backyard deck for the first time, changing the atmosphere in the evenings to a festive experience, which I will show you by the end of the video.
Vegetable Garden Tips
The first tip for vegetable gardens is to have raised beds so that you can dump really good soil into them. When I first moved into this property 20 years ago, I didn’t know that the soil was not good for growing anything. Not only was it too sandy with rocks (look at the dirt that I’m sitting on in the video), but the 23 pine trees on our property make the soil acidic. Furthermore, most of my backyard is in shade because of the trees.
I love the fact that my backyard looks like the woods. But eventually I realized that the only way to improve my yard was to grow mostly shaded plants. Tip #2 for a vegetable garden, then, is to try to find a place where there is sun. We finally found a place (that used to be a dirt pile) to the right of our deck.
Last year we only had one raised bed, as you can see in the picture below. I didn’t know how large the plants would grow, so I overcrowded it. For this reason, even though there were lots of leaves, the plants didn’t produce much fruit.
So tip #3 for a vegetable garden is not to overcrowd the plants. Leave space between the plants. Then the roots won’t be competing for the nutrients in the soil with any other plants, and the sun can shine on all the leaves of each plant.
Tip #4 would be to give the vegetable garden a good watering every day, especially when the plants are young.
Tip #5 is to have tomato cages for the tomatoes, and if you are growing beans or other vines, place the raised bed next to a fence so they have something to crawl up. Next year I might add a third bed next to the chain link fence just for this purpose. This year all I needed was the tomato cages to re-enforce the stems of the tomato plants, so they don’t topple over or break with the wind.
Tip #6 is to pick off any dead leaves that you see. This keeps the plants healthy.
Perennial Garden Tips
At the beginning, the perennial garden didn’t look like much. When removing the pine needles and dead leaves, we saw a few green perennials coming up. (Perennials are flowers that come up year after year.) We trimmed the bushes, pulled some weeds, and amended with good soil. After a month of watering the garden, it looked beautiful!
This perennial garden is right outside the bay window of my dining room, so it can be enjoyed every time we sit down to eat a meal.
Rose Garden Tips
My rose garden is in the front yard, but I thought I would include it in the gardening that we do. I show you in the video how to prune the rose bushes after uncovering them from the winter. We also put rose fertilizer on each bush. Roses are my favorite flower, so I really love this garden!
The back porch looks lovelier this year than ever, since my husband hung lights on poles bolted down to blocks of cement. (I show you a close-up of the base of these poles in the video.) My husband placed a hook on the top of each pole, and strung white lights. It feels like I am in Europe, where I traveled and lived before I was married. It makes me feel so much joy!
Here are some other gardening posts you might like:
Growing a sweet potato in water is a great way to see plant roots growing. You will need a sweet potato, a jar, water, and four toothpicks.
You will want to dip the sweet potato into the water about a third of the way down. Stab the toothpicks into the potato to keep it in place. Fill the jar with water. Now watch the roots grow right in front of your very eyes.
First you will see stubble, like a man who hasn’t shaved in a couple of days. This happens within the first few days. Then a few of the roots grow longer, branching out with root hairs. Since the jar is clear, you can see all this happening.
Other people buy expensive kits that have glass walls on either side so that you can see the roots of carrots and radishes growing, but the dirt is still in the way. With growing a sweet potato in water, you can see the root developing without any dirt in the way, and it doesn’t cost a lot.
In biology this year, we studied the sections of a root, looking at the root under a microscope. The children were fascinated when they looked at prepared slides of monocot and dicot roots, which apparently have a different structure. Monocot roots have a circle shape in the middle, whereas dicots have an X shape.
The main way to know if a plant is monocot or dicot is to look at its leaves. If the leaves are straight up and down like leaves of grass, it’s a monocot. If the leaf has veins branching out, it’s a dicot.
Hi! I'm Susan Evans. I speak at homeschool conferences about hands-on learning and run a huge unit study membership site. I also speak at women's retreats on the topic of prayer.
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