Microgreens are great – they lend your food a good load of nutritional punch and aromatic flavor without filling you up too much because of their small size. That makes them a great addition to many dishes. Problem is, they can be quite expensive, hard to find, and quick to spoil, which has relegated their use primarily to restaurants and cafes. The Tablefarm lets you grow a small garden of microgreens right in your own home.
Just like the Click and Grow, it’s an indoor tabletop garden that lets you make your own batch of produce right from the comfort of your own home. Unlike it, though, it’s designed specifically for growing microgreens, so you can enjoy the nutrient-dense, flavor-intense baby plants in your home-cooked meals any time you want.
The Tablefarm is a tabletop micro-garden that looks similar to other self-contained mini-hydroponic rigs out there, combining a box-shaped garden with its own watering system and a set of LEDs (1493 total lumens) installed underneath a carry handle, with the whole thing taking up 15.4 x 7.9 x 5.9 inches of space (width x height x depth). Since microgreens don’t grow large leaves, that’s, pretty much, all the space it will take up, allowing you to keep this practically anywhere in the house where the plants can, at least, get some air. The box comes with three separate planters, so you can use it to grow up to three different types of microgreens simultaneously, while making it easy to replace one of the planters, in case you decide to grow something else instead of what you originally planted.
Designed to take much of the work out of gardening, the main box has an integrated watering system that will give the plants all the water they need all on its own. All you need to do is refill the water chamber once a week and the system will take care of itself, with no need to hook it up to your existing water system at home. You will, however, need to plug it in to a power outlet, since the LEDs, which will turn on, dim, and switch off all on their own at various times, will need a steady power source, providing the necessary daylight the plants need to grow.
The Tablefarm doesn’t use any soil to grow your microgreens. Instead, the individual planters are meant to take the outfit’s own seed pads, which is a hydroponic substrate that’s preloaded with a bunch of microgreen seeds. All you need to do is place one of the seed pads into a planter, add water to the chamber, plug it in, and switch it on. From there, the system will handle everything else, giving you fresh microgreens ready to harvest within seven to 10 days.
The seed pads are available via a subscription service that will get you seven of them every month for $15. For the introductory service, they only have six types of microgreens available, namely radish, amaranthus, cilantro, kale, red cabbage, and watercress, although they promise more options to come going forward.
A Kickstarter campaign is currently running for Tablefarm. You can reserve a unit for pledges starting at $99, with deliveries scheduled for March of next year.