Hydroponic culture of foodstuffs with hacked Aerogarden

In the quest for a more sustainable lifestyle we are investigating various avenues to become more independent and green. Our first experiment involved using a Aerogarden growing system, which comes ready made.

The used system I purchased on Ebay had a defective light bulb and I paid only 1/4 the price of a new system for it (50 Dollars / 40 Euro. I quickly discovered that spare parts in Germany are impossible to come by.  Had I paid the full price of 200 Dollars, then I would also have had to buy a new light bulb after 1-2 years.

As it happened, I planned to replace the "energy saver" grow bulbs of the original system with LED lamps anyways, so it didn't matter to me that a bulb was broken.

Using the LED's the aeroponic system now uses only 1/3 the electricity of the standard system, which works out at 10kw per month. The LED's I had to import from China, as they were not available in Europe.

The result are basil leafs of 12cm / 4.7 inches in length, versus the standard 1 inch you get in a supermarket. Our lettuce is regularly plucked for BLT, so I can't say how big it might get undisturbed.

In my next post I will explain how these result were achieved.
We don't use the Aerogarden nutrient pack or seeds, but our own system.