Category: Learning Project

Hello everyone,

So last week I left off with having my seedlings started for my Tower Garden, and they have been doing pretty…well not too great actually. This picture is after 2 weeks of growth. 

A lot of the seeds haven’t come up and many that have of pretty flimsy. But I am still optimistic I will have seedlings to move into my tower. But first I need a tower to put them in! So on to assembly time…

I wanted to check the instructions from the manufacture again, just too see since I knew I would need a new source after. Last week when I used the instruction video from the manufacture on seedling starting, I found it very quick and short on details. And wouldn’t you know it, the video breezed through the process again, except this time I thought the task was way more complicated. It might just be me, but I don’t find these” fast paced show you had its done with no voiced instructions just soothing elevator music” style of videos very helpful.

I set to work on the set up, but knew right away I need help with the instructions. So I found this awesome video on the True Garden YouTube channel that gave great visual cues to work off. The video’s author walks you through the setup in real time while talking you through the process. They had a lot of helpful tips that someone who has built a few of these units would find out, so I was happy to find this source before I got too far into assembly! Honestly, it wasn’t that difficult to get assembled once I got to have someone walk me through it.

And here we go! Set up and almost ready to grow! I managed to squeeze it into a corner in our living room and I think it looks pretty good, my cat Luna isn’t too sure about it though…

This week, I am going to get this thing filled up and ready to accept some seedlings. Also, I’m going to look into why my seedlings didn’t do so hot. Lots left to learn!

Jerome

This week I was taking my first steps to getting my Tower Garden going! Now, the manufacturer recommends step one is getting your tower set up, but that is a pretty big job and I wanted to  start with something smaller. So I decided to skip to step two and start getting my seedlings growing. I figured that since these seeds take a few weeks to mature enough to make into the tower, I was have time while waiting for them to mature to set up my tower. This, by the way, is  the same order the previous owner of this Tower Garden tried, and they never got past the seed growing phase, so hopefully I can do a bit better!

So step one was getting some of the resources I needed. my new to me garden tower didn’t quite come with all the pieces. I needed to order some new rock wool  growing media. There were some seeds for lettuces left from the pervious owner, but I ordered some new herbs as well. Since I wanted to start using manufacturer available online information, I went to the Tower Garden website’s resource page and they had a guide on what kind of seeds to grow that I went off of. It was pretty much just leafy greens and herbs, but I have seen other people online growing things not on this list like strawberries and tomatoes. But I thought I would stick to the leafy greens and herbs for now.

The website also had  a link on growing seedlings that took me to a video on the Tower Garden Youtube Channel.

It was a helpful video, but super short and really breezed through the process. I had to watch it over a couple of times to get all the info I needed. I think a longer, for detailed video would have really helped here, but I was still able to get things started!

These are my seedlings after a week! I am not sure every one of them is going to sprout and/or survive, but I feel like they is enough going that I will have something to transfer to the tower.

Cheers!

Jerome Schmeiser

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!

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!