Indoor "AeroGarden" type herb garden suggestions?

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paradoxbox
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Indoor "AeroGarden" type herb garden suggestions?

Post by paradoxbox »

I want to have an indoor herb garden for my apartment.

We have a veranda facing southeast but it's still winter and light on it gets cut off by shadow after about 3pm in the summer, so I'm thinking for Basil etc. a little LED garden might be the way to go.

Anyone rocking something like this?

I am thinking something that can grow between 4-6 herb plants, either with soil or preferably hydroponically, that doesn't need a lot of maintenance. Will probably just put it in one of my spare rooms and cut herbs as I need 'em for cooking or for aroma stuff.

Tried finding Aerogardens on Amazon but they're like 40,000 yen, apparently no real distributor in Japan.

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Eric in Japan
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Re: Indoor "AeroGarden" type herb garden suggestions?

Post by Eric in Japan »

I would make an earthbox type planter from a home center black plastic tote, and then for light run some LED tape along the inside of some split bamboo and make an arch over the planter.

not much time, just kinda scribbled this out.
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Re: Indoor "AeroGarden" type herb garden suggestions?

Post by Paletti »

When it comes to these indoor gardens it's all about the amount of light... i.e. lumen. On Amazon you can find some decent LED bulbs with ~1300 lumen, a couple of those should be enough to grow herbs like basil in a square foot garden and they'r not that expensive. You could attach that to the underside of one of those vertical kitchen cabinet shelves and run that 24/7. You do want to saw off the plastic dome of the bulb though to make sure the light goes straight down onto your plants.

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Re: Indoor "AeroGarden" type herb garden suggestions?

Post by paradoxbox »

Good ideas from both of you, thanks.

Yep, the LED lights work well, I have grown tomato seedlings to a very jungly wild state using nothing but my two desk lamps and a bunch of paper cups with soil in them.

I'd like to keep this build or garden very clean and free of insects though. The cups used to get little fruit flies or some other kind of tiny fly breeding in the soil and they were very difficult to eradicate. Even drying them out completely didn't stop the buggers. The extreme winter cold and summer heat killed 'em off though.

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Re: Indoor "AeroGarden" type herb garden suggestions?

Post by Zasso Nouka »

Those little flies are probably fungus gnats, the bane of basement 'Herb Gardeners' ;)

There are several solutions, predatory nematodes or a layer of sand on top of the pots that stops the female flies from being able to lay their eggs in the soil. Make sure they can't reach the soil through the drainage holes in the bottom of the pots.

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