Gardening through the winter with Aerogardens

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Buffalo

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Oct 25, 2022
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293
Location
Central Nebraska/Northwest Kansas
Most of us in the northern hemisphere are well into winter, so our gardens are only blooming in our imagination! But, it doesn't have to be thay way! We have been using Aerogardens for the last three years to extend our growing season to all 12 months of the year. It all started when my wife wanted a bounty sized Aerogarden to grow kitchen and medicinal herbs in. We soon outgrew the bounty and added a Farm 24Xl to the herd. Last year we were able to add another Farm24 to the stable. This allows us to plant up to 57 plants at any one time, although we have learned that we get better results planting half to one-third of what the capacity is.

Last night I started 3 of our 4 large aerogarden trays up, one was already started with salad greens a couple of weeks ago. We will be growing several varieties of salad greens, two varieties of spinach as well as two varieties of tomatoes this winter.

We try and time this so we are just finishing up harvesting the winter vegetables about the same time we are ready to start our seeds. Come late March into early April, we will be starting all of our garden seeds in the Aerogardens. The Farms have a seed starting capacity of 160 plants and the Bounty has a capacity of 50. The Farms are used for the garden plants and I have been starting trees in the Bounty the last year.

The upside to these hydroponic gardens is they are very very simple to use and are as automatic as they can be. The only user inputs are to make sure the water reservoirs are full, add plant food and move the lights up as the plants grow. The lights automatically turn on and off and the food/water mix is pumped through the system on a timed basis. The downside to them is they can be quite expensive, but we have had really good luck purchasing them directly from Aerogarden when they have sales and specials on them.


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My DW has a tower Garden, which is a water system.
I am lucky that it never get really cold here & never snows more that a few inches, if at all.
Last month it got down to 13F for about 12 hours, the lowest in thirty years.
So here most people grow Winter crops out side & Spring crops in tunnels.
If you want tomatoes, you need a green house in the Winter here.
Growth lamps work if you can control Damp off.
I have Ginger & pepper plants in doors for the first time, with my hose plants at the widow.
 
My DW has a tower Garden, which is a water system.
I am lucky that it never get really cold here & never snows more that a few inches, if at all.
Last month it got down to 13F for about 12 hours, the lowest in thirty years.
So here most people grow Winter crops out side & Spring crops in tunnels.
If you want tomatoes, you need a green house in the Winter here.
Growth lamps work if you can control Damp off.
I have Ginger & pepper plants in doors for the first time, with my hose plants at the widow.
Here in the Great Plains, we get really extreme weather throughout the year. Just last week we had -19F ambient temps and -56F wind chills, so unfortunately any outside gardening is completely shut down during the winter. I've been researching other styles and designs for hydroponic gardens.

The plan for the homestead is to build a walapini for year round growing. I'd like to incorporate IBF totes into the design for tilapia and perch to live in, and use their waste water to help fertilize the plants in the walapini. It is really nice to be able to have fresh salad greens throughout the cold months, those bagged salads at the grocery store are never very tasty and they seem to go bad the day after you buy them. With the Aerogarden, we just trim off the amount of lettuce and greens we need for either that day or the next couple of days, give it a quick wash and consume.
 
So you start all your seeds for the garden in hydro systems?
i have one of those areogardens and did not have any luck with it. Any tips?
The last two years we have started our seeds in the aerogardens and have had amazing success with them. I think the biggest game changer for us was getting quality seed. In the past we had either bought seed from the local hardware store (mainly burpees brand stuff) or from companies like Jung and Gurney's. Two years ago I started ordering seed from True Leaf Market. It was night and day difference. With the other brands and companies, if we had 50% germination we felt like we were doing pretty good, but with TLM, 85 to 90% is normal.

What we have found with seed starting in the AGs is that it takes significantly less time for the seeds to germinate and grow. I estimate it is 14 days less time, so you have to be aware of that. What our normal routine has become is to start our cool weather crops in late March, let them germinate and sprout into seedlings. Then we give them a couple more weeks in the aerogarden before transplanting to pots. You could go directly into the ground with them, but we have a grow shelf set up and use it to give them some more time to mature and then it is a lot easier to harden them off.

I bought a big case of paper pots (I think there are 500 pots in it) and fill them with a mix of 25% pearlite, 25% potting soil and 50% coco coir. I mix this up in a big plastic trash can with a lid. I mix up the potting mix and add enough water to moisten it to a level I am happy with. That is the mix I have been using for years and it works really well for us.

As far as general use with the Aerogarden goes, the biggest thing is not overcrowding it. They sell the aerogardens as a so many pod system, but they really aren't. For lettuces, I don't plant more than 1/3 to 1/2 of the pod spots. For larger plants, like tomatoes or peppers, one plant for every six pod spaces. Another thing we have learned is that flowering fruits need a helping hand when it comes to pollination. The first go around we tried using a fan and blowing across the plants and it worked alright, but for Christmas a couple of years ago, my sister got me a vibrating hand pollinator (essentially an electric toothbrush with a different head on it) and that works amazing. It's more work, as you have to touch each blossom with the hand pollinator, but I would estimate I grew half a bushel of cherry tomatoes last winter using that whereas the year before with the fan, I only harvested a gallon jugs worth.

Another thing is that we don't use the premade pods from Aerogarden (save for their salad blends, which are really quite good). You can order new stickers/covers and new coco inserts for the existing plastic pods and then just put whatever seed you want in them. I didn't care for the spinach that they offered, it was pretty bitter, so I grow a giant variety that I have seeds for. We don't let the lettuce and spinach get too big, it gets a "haircut" with sharp kitchen scissors every few days. Last winter in the top basic farm, we grew enough salad greens to harvest two gallon bags of lettuce a week. We gave one bag to my parents and kept one for us, not to mention the days we just cut the salad greens and tossed them in a bowl to have fresh for a meal.
 

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