I recently lost all of my phone numbers and was forced to respond to every single message with “Hey, sorry, who’s this?”
Needless to say, it was getting a little repetitive…but that changed when I got a picture message of two Tower Gardens with the message, “You want these?”
YES. YES I WANT THOSE.
Turns out it was one of my good friends who works with a company that gets a lot of free product for promotions. They didn’t end up using the Tower Gardens and wanted to get them out of the office, so my buddy thought of me, which was very cool of him.
I stopped what I was doing and drove downtown to pick them up. In about an hour’s time, I had two fully assembled Tower Gardens set up in my backyard and ready to grow!
The Ultimate Tower Garden Review
This post is going to be an ever-updating review of the Tower Garden product as I go through a full grow cycle on both of my gardens.
To start off, here’s a quick video tour of what the systems look like.
Planting Seeds In The Tower Garden
I sprouted a bunch of seeds (kale, a few types of lettuce, spinach, chard, and beans) and gave them a week or so to germinate. They started to pop up like crazy and I knew the time had come.
It was finally time to plant in my Tower Garden!
I filmed a quick clip to share my thoughts on the planting process and the three things you really need to watch out for if you want to plant your Tower Garden correctly. Check it out:
Transplanting Into The Tower Garden: My Mistakes
There were a few things that I messed up along the way of transplanting into the tower.
- Make sure to harden off your seedlings enough before transplanting
- Don’t let your seedlings stretch too far before you transplant
This video goes into more detail about the transplant process and what I could have done better. Don’t repeat my mistakes!
The Growth Explosion!
After adding a very small amount of nutrients to the reservoir and pHing the solution, I let the garden grow for about a week or so. I wanted to be sure that the plants weren’t suffering any wind/temperature/sun shock from transplanting, as well as let them mature a bit before I upped the nutrient solution.
After a week, I added another 450ppm of General Hydroponics Three Part to my solution, bringing it to around 850ppm. Around 350 of that is due to extremely hard water in San Diego, and the remaining 500ppm was GH 3 part. I also readjusted the pH, as it had rised from 6.0 to 7.0 over the course of the week. Finally, I added some Zyme Alive! (review coming soon) from my buddy Max at CropKing. Zyme Alive! is an additive that speeds up biocatalysis. In other words, it helps your plants absorb nutrients faster and deploy them in critical growth functions.
The results of these changes were…explosive. The video below goes into more detail, so check it out:
Growth After One Month In The Towers
Finally, it’s been a month! Check out the new updates in the video below. For those of you who want to watch, you’re missing out…because the plants absolutely blew up in the last week…check it out:
The First Harvest Off Of The Tower Gardens
I was able to harvest the greens pictured above only 3.5 weeks from placing seedlings in the tower. There are a lot of different types of greens going on in this picture, all of them a mix of spinach, lettuce, kale, or chard.
By the way, have you looked at those spinach leaves? I’ve never seen spinach leaves that big before! I’m not going to say it’s all the Tower Garden’s doing, because I carefully watched the nutrition and pH levels, as well as added some Zyme Alive biocatalyst into the reservoir.
Regardless, it’s clear that the tower garden can produce massive amounts of greens in a short amount of time.
The cucumber and beans are still in vegetative phase, and as I harvest the greens I’ll be transitioning them into the flowering phase in the next couple of weeks.
