Table of Contents
- The Routine Maintenance
- Watering
- Humidty Domes
- Harvesting Limits
- Overshadowing
- The Harvesting Process
- To Replant After Harvest
About a month ago we did a review and setup guide here all about our Smart Garden 9 that Click and Grow kindly sent us. Along with all of the wonderful extras that they sent as well. There were definitely lots of plants and today we just wanted to do an update on all of that. This is just to follow up and update you on having a click and grow a garden. What it is like actually using it and utilizing it and how the daily workings of it are.
The Routine Maintenance
Maintaining the Smart Garden 9 has been very very easy. Once we planted our little pods in the device with all of our little seeds; we unnecessarily checked them every single day. The timed grow light came on for it set amount of time and then turned itself off each day. We did not have to do anything with that.
Watering
After filling up the water reservoir one time in the very beginning when we first set everything up, we only filled it up one more time a couple of days ago. This was just because it was starting to run low. It had not even emptied all the way yet.
In order to see if it needed to be filled or not we just regularly tapped the little floating buoy button in the corner and it bounces and lets you know the water level. If it sits all the way at the bottom that means it is not floating in the water anymore and then it will float all the way to the top when you have the reservoir filled with water.
It should last for 30 days on average. In intense heat maybe not as much but it should last 30 days on average, especially in normal household environments. Ours definitely lasted about that as well.
Humidty Domes
Another thing that we had to pay attention to after we planted our little seed pods was the humidity domes. You cover the planted pods with a clear little humidity dome and that traps all of the humidity in there. It helps the seeds sprout. Once the seeds sprouted we did wait until the leaves were on the actual dome itself and make sure that they were mature enough before removing the dome.
One of the little strawberry plants was not ready while the other 2 were big enough so we took the domes off the bigger two and left the third on for now. If we left the bigger leaves under the dome some of the leaves could rot in the high humidity or if the plant was big enough it could just push off the dome by itself.
Harvesting Limits
We really pushed the limit on the lettuce we grew. It should have been harvested probably about a week or two ago but we really wanted to experiment and see how long it was going to be able to thrive in this particular environment. We wanted to see how long the nutrients would sustain it as a mature plant. The lettuce did become very rootbound and needed to be repotted.
The system is definitely not meant for long-term permanent planting without extra fertilizers in there. There are only so many nutrients in each little pod so definitely crops need to be harvested and eaten.
Overshadowing
The lettuce did overshadow the strawberries because it grows so quickly and is so bushy. It is definitely another thing to keep in mind when you are layering in your different seed pods. Consider what is going to grow a little faster and what’s gonna grow a little bit slower. What is a lower bushier plant and what is a taller plant that is going to be blocking light?
Strawberries need more light so the lettuce did not help by blocking the light that the strawberries were going to receive. As a result, we harvested the lettuce but left the strawberry plants to harvest later.
The Harvesting Process
Harvesting is easy. We just pop each pod out of the smart garden. Remove the plastic collar carefully and unpot our plant. They all have a lot of healthy roots from the self-watering system which is fantastic. Now we can repot these plants in a pre-moistened media or we can eat it however we want. It is nice to know exactly where and how our food was grown.
To Replant After Harvest
Refilling a Click and Grow setup is easy. We are going to leave the strawberries in because they need a lot more time to grow. We decided to grow tomatoes and basil next. It will be fun to see which produces first the tomatoes or strawberries.
To replant, we open the seed pod packaging. Place the seed pods into the self-watering pots and click the collar into place. Then place the pot back into the system and cover it with a dome.
This has just been such a fun product and checking the plants on a regular and watching them grow is just been so amazing to watch. Really learning the limits and how this system works has been incredibly fun. Harvesting and replanting are just super easy. Everything has just been so easy to care for so low maintenance other than paying attention to the first couple of days with the domes it is all self-sustainable.
The only issue that I can come across is that the plants are so happy they actually outgrow the products eventually. So you do need to remove them eventually. It definitely encourages you to make more space for more plants. This is really great so you get to actually shuffle them around, you can grow more, or you can chop it back, and then periodically it will continue to grow like with the lettuce. Overall, we are still absolutely thrilled with the smart garden 9. We do have a link down below and you can use our code to save on it as well.
