LONDON, England (Reuters) — The lack of space in towns and cities means growing your own vegetables and herbs is often limited to what can fit on your windowsill.
But so-called ‘smart gardens’ are bringing the window box in to the 21st century.
‘Click and Grow,’ based in Estonia, is at the forefront of smart garden technology designed to make urban farming easy.
At the IFA consumer technology fair in Berlin, the company previewed its latest model – the ‘Smart Garden 9’ – which the company says is the culmination of years of research and testing.
Urban farmers start by placing a ‘smart soil’ capsule into the garden, containing the plants seeds.
The soil pod structure was designed to release nutrients in sync with the plant life cycle, as well as keep soil pH balanced.
It also has small oxygen pockets to make sure plants get ample breathing room and nutrients even when the soil is wet.
Each soil capsule delivers a maximum of three harvests of any given plant.
The soil pod is placed in a plastic container which is then slotted into the smart garden.
A tube below each soil pod draws water from the tank underneath.
Once the light is switched on, all the user need do is sit back and let the smart garden do the rest.
“It has a wick solution, so basically it starts to drain the water from the water tank, and the lamp does the rest of the job. The lamp imitates daylight time, so it’s 16 hours on and 8 hour off. So far we have tested some 7,000 different plants and each growing substrate is designed specifically for this plant,” Karel Kask from ‘Click and Grow’ told Reuters at IFA in Berlin.
He added that hundreds of lighting combinations have been tested to deliver the optimal spectrum for the plants to grow between 30 and 50 percent faster than they would do in natural conditions.
“Sunlight not only consists of white light, it consists of seven different spectral lights; we have tested some 500, even up to a thousand, different lighting solutions,” said Kask. “We see that the red and white lights create the perfect spectrum for the plants to grow in.”
Click and Grow says all its plants, including edible vegetables and herbs, are organic and free from GMOs (genetically modified organisms).
Kask added the system was inspired by NASA technology, including the Veg-01 experiment, aimed at studying how plants grow in orbit in order to give astronauts on possible longer missions in the future the ability to grow their own meals and fresh produce in space.
“They’re using quite similar soil based solutions; so they take the soil substrate into space and grow them already in there. They have an automated watering solution. So it’s quite similar to the solution that we do,” said Kask.
IFA is the largest tech fair in Europe and ends on September 6.
