We’ve long been fans of Click and Grow’s indoor gardening products, which made growing plants at home a set-and-forget experience. This time around, they’re pushing the gardening automation even further with a scalable system called the Click & Grow Smart Farm. Yep, a farm!
That’s right, not only can you use the company’s products to grow decorative plants and succulents inside the house with the littlest amount of work, you can soon do the same with growing actual produce. Whether you want to raise and harvest your own strawberries, tomatoes, or lettuce indoors, this will let you do that with the same set-and-forget automation as the outfit’s previous creations.
Designed as a simpler and more practical alternative to hydroponic farming, the Click & Grow Smart Farm uses a new type of soil called Smart Soil, which the company claims balances oxygen, water, and nutritional ingredients at an optimal level. Combined with LED grow lights and an electronic precision irrigation system, the setup can automatically nourish and grow the plants at costs up to 80 percent less than a comparable hydroponic or aeroponic system. Instead of planting seeds, it uses the same cartridge-based solution as their original smart planter, which you simply insert into the designated slots to get a farm going.
The system consists of an enclosed box with multiple rows of shelves, each one containing a rectangular planter with individual slots for growing a single plant. Everything is contained within the enclosure, making it easy to find a space for in the house. It comes in three sizes: small (four shelves growing up to 64 plants at once), large (five shelves growing 250 plants at once), and open (a customizable system that starts at 50 plants, but can be adjusted depending on available space).
The Click & Grow Smart Farm will launch for retail in 2016.