Gardyn Indoor Hydroponic Garden Review: Better Growing Through AI

I am in the In the middle of the creation of a purchasing guide for interior vertical gardening systems, and the Gardyn – the 30 Plant Plant 4.0To be exact – was the first tester to arrive at home. I made it unpacking and I was installed in a few hours, the lights on and the water pump on the move. I am already a pro! I thought.

Indeed, in a few weeks, all the Ycubes owners of Gardyn, filled with seeds, had germinated, and a few weeks after that, I harvested bowls of herbs and salads. Even if from the configuration to the harvest, the Gardyn required the use of around five brain cells, I was very satisfied with myself, despite the fact that it is long ago, gardening outside due to deer, rabbits and my own incompetence with something other than the large-area store.

What I did not understand, but that I would arrive at subsequent systems is that interior hydroponic gardening is just as difficult in certain respects as outdoor gardening. However, I had no way of knowing it because the costly complementary application of Gardyn and the garden assistant AI, “Kelby”, had done all the real work via a network of live sensors and cameras live (two on the larger model, one on the small studio).

LIVE EASY

My new friend Kelby had gathered data in order to define his own watering times, plan her 60 LED lights and send me the occasional personalized task that has never taken more than 10 minutes. And this personalized maintenance is not only useful for convenience, because mold, bacteria or roots obstructing plumbing are extremely common in hydroponic gardening. Kelby told me when adding the necessary nutrients (included) and how much to add, when and how to take care of the roots of the plants, and even when harvesting.

Photography: Kat Merck

There is also remote monitoring, of course, and a vacation mode that keeps plants in a sort of stasis. Most of the work on my side was simply me by admiring my plants and admiring them. The first time I saw a Gardyn, a few years ago, in a parade of Show House houses, adjacent to a wine cabinet from floor to ceiling. “Wow, what is it?! I want one!” announced almost all the people who mixed in their paper boots. Even in a 2 million dollars specification house, the illuminated screen of lush herbs, flowers and vegetables was a showstopper.

When I started testing other systems, I felt big enough for my britches. At this stage, I had successfully grew up sunflowers, a lemon maker and even an entire Kohlrabi. I have that! In the five minutes following the opening of the boxes of other systems and the search for pH test strips and bottles, manual timer and several bags of supplements, however, I realized that I did not have that. In fact, I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. Gardyn had only done me think I knew what I was doing. And, according to the founder FX Rouxel (pronounced FX, like the initials), this is the raison d’être of Gardyn de Gardyn.

Growth

With the kind permission of Kat Merck

You might expect the founder of a hydroponic gardening system to have agricultural training (maybe even a certain agriculture), but Rouxel is a technological guy. Although he worked once for the French version of the Environmental Protection Agency, his most recent pre-Gardyn concert was with the French IT Company Capgemini, the deployment of cloud, automation and AI technologies. Although he is also a parent athlete, cook and Ironman, his passion lies in the use of technology to reduce the entrance barrier to the cultivation of your own food.

“With other systems, they are essentially a pump on a timer,” Rouxel told me during a recent interview. “You should know what you are doing. We watched, “Can we use AI to solve this problem?” Unlike our competitors, we have a large part of the company which is only engineers. “They make sure that the Gardyn application adapts constantly through the data collected via the two cameras and sensors of the system which follow the use of water, humidity, temperature and growth of plants. If the system identifies a problem, it will send the user a specific task via the application to repair it.

Note that I found that the cameras were slightly glitch in the seven weeks that I used Gardyn, requiring periodic system reset to keep them online. It did not seem to affect any of my vegetable tasks or statistics, but I nevertheless found it irritating. Although if I did not use the Kelby functionality, that would not matter, because the cameras are essentially useless otherwise.