I wanted to use this learning project as an opportunity to expand a hobby of mine that I have been neglecting for a while. I love to garden and to grow. My first degree was in biology, and I grew up in a family that always had a large garden. I have had a love of nurturing and growing things from a young age. As I grew up and became a home owner of my own, I got a lot of enjoyment in cleaning up our yard, planting flower gardens, trees, and a vegetables garden every year. I’ve also filled out our house with a variety of house plants that I have been tending, some for years! This past year, I even set up a grow tent in my basement so I could have more room for repotted house plants and starting seedlings for the garden!

To encourage my passion, my awesome and lovely wife Alana (a teacher of ten years, and my inspiration to become an educator) found me an hydroponics grow tower. It was used, but never actually used, and Alana found it on Facebook market place. A husband had gotten it for their wife and it ended up sitting in a basement collecting dust for a while before they decided to sell it. Well, now I am in the same predicament where I have been letting this gift gather dust for the last 4 months!

Image displays a hydroponics tower from the Tower Garden company

So my mission, is to get this thing up and running and growing! Hopefully I’ll have some tasty produce to show for it! Step one will be getting some seedlings started, so I will be looking at information on how to use the growing medium that this system uses. Once I have the seeds started, I will have to figure out how to assemble and fill the tower. Then hopefully, I will be able to transplant the seedlings to the tower and grow from there!

I thought this would be a good fit for this project because this thing came with very little in terms of an owners/operators manual, so I am going to be navigating this journey using online resources. I have already check out the Tower Garden website, which has some helpful resources. There is a lot of instructional videos on YouTube too (some directly from the manufacture) I plan on using, especially for complicated stuff like the physically set up. There are also online communities I plan to use for this project too, like the enthusiasts over at Reddit on the the hydroponics subreddit.

I’m excite to get this working! I can’t wait to be able to pick free produce right in my living room!