Grow your own food this winter within the comfort of your home.
Let’s talk CEA. If you’ve never heard the term before, CEA stands for Controlled Environment Agriculture, and it refers to growing in an enclosed space of some sort to be able to manipulate conditions for optimal growth of whatever crop is within said enclosure. More and more of these CEA operations are popping up in the forms of rooftop greenhouses, vertical gardens, shipping containers, and the like.
If you want to blow your own mind, hop down the YouTube and Google rabbit hole search for “Netherlands — greenhouses — vegetable production.” You will quickly see that farming doesn’t need to look like the farm as we know it, with its vast, open swaths of dirt beds; costly single-use machines, crop dusters, and fertilizers; and endless hours of irrigation, fertigation, and humans laboring, mostly bent over, from planting through harvest. It can look so different from this, thanks to vertical farms (real back savers), aquaponics farms (using fish poop), hydroponics farms (using no soil), fogponics/aeroponics (think air and mist), and even little micro-grow systems for your home (think The Jetsons).
Growing Interest
Wendy Thompson and her partner, Jason Brothers, chose to give CEA a try in their Downtown Reno apartment during their first “pandemic Christmas.” They chose the Lettuce Grow vertical garden, founded by film producer Jacob Pechenik and actress/singer Zooey Deschanel. It is svelte and undulating, at 2 feet wide by 6 feet tall, as well as white and rotating, and it could have easily made a cameo in George and Jane Jetson’s home.
“We chose it because it was the prettiest,” says Thompson with a laugh, a little embarrassed.
Fair point — many of the taller vertical garden models that can be found online look like they could’ve walked themselves off the set of Stranger Things. Not everyone wants a sci-fi creature lurking in the corner of their living room. I get it.
And Lettuce Grow is attractive: Above each tier of vegetables and herbs, red and white glow lights form luminescent rings, which are plugged into the cylindrical base, where water and nutrients are fed straight to the roots. No soil is involved, so there’s no mess, which is ideal for an indoor grow.
“Occasionally, you need to trim the roots so they don’t get tangled up,” Brothers says. “But it’s really only about 15 minutes of care a week.”
“I don’t think either one of us expected much of a positive coming out of the garden, but it definitely was the case for us,” Thompson says. “Before, if I were to ever say, ‘Let’s have a salad for dinner,’ Jason would begrudgingly go along with it. But now that we have this, I just say, ‘OK, just go pick us a salad.’ It’s fun. It was such a bright light during COVID … it was so nice to see everything growing and thriving so much when you saw everything else dwindling and shut down.”
“Yeah,” Brothers echoes, “it was so cool to go away for a few days and come back and see the lettuces had already tripled in size.”
And it’s not just lettuces. Take a peek at the Lettuce Grow website (Lettucegrow.com) and you’ll see a myriad of plant choices: from edible flowers and peas to broccoli and strawberries.
Additional perks of the Lettuce Grow tower, aside from sprucing up a corner of one’s home, include that it consumes less plastic, produces food with higher nutrient density, offers a constant supply of fresh herbs, reduces your produce bill, deepens interest in growing food, and expands your palate to include veggies such as wasabi arugula, oak leaf lettuce, and baby romaine.
“We’re lettuce connoisseurs now,” Thompson proudly says.
Systems to Consider
If you are interested in growing food in your home but are concerned about price (Lettuce Grow starts at $500), there are other more affordable models. AeroGarden is another aeroponics system that contains light and comes in a wide range of sizes and prices. The style is simple, and many models can fit atop your kitchen counter.
At Moana Nursery in Reno and Sparks, you can find the Vegepod, a raised bed with soil as the medium, which includes a netted cover with irrigation hookups. Products come in a range of sizes and prices. They do not offer lights, so this would be best suited for an area inside the home that has direct sunlight.
Happy growing!
Cameron Cox is an ecological landscape designer and general food and farming enthusiast. She can be found hiking with her dogs Dutch and Bandit and pretending cheese is kale.
RESOURCES
AeroGarden
Aerogarden.com
Lettuce Grow
Lettucegrow.com
Vegepod
Available at Moana Nursery in Reno or Sparks (Moananursery.com) or at Vegepod.com.
