Gardyn Studio 2 review: This smart garden turned my black thumb green

I can’t grow anything. Multiple attempts to establish a home garden, first in Idaho and now in South Carolina, have brought disappointment. Both are challenging climates, but where others have succeeded, all I’m left with is a pile of cherry tomatoes for my Herculean efforts (those things are bulletproof).

I had completely given up on the idea of ​​successfully growing my own food—I can’t even keep pots of herbs you buy at the grocery store alive for more than a week—until I met the boss. Garden Studio 2.

The Gardyn Studio 2 is a smart indoor garden, an automated growing platform that uses artificial intelligence to do what it fails to do: monitor my plants and care for them properly.

It works through a combination of hydroponic irrigation, automated lighting, a camera that takes photos of plants, and algorithms that analyze the plants’ growth and adaptation stages. An AI assistant called Kelby, which requires a subscription, manages light and water cycles, sends alerts when I need to intervene, and processes all the data from Gardyn’s sensors and camera to help your plants grow.

It’s an impressive system, if very expensive. In the three months I’ve lived in my house, I’ve grown sunflowers, whole kale, lots of basil, lettuce, green beans, chard, and some other delicious exotic vegetables I’ve never heard of. I’m currently working on strawberries, cherry tomatoes, lavender, jalapenos, and crisp lettuce – in my dining room come December. That’s why I love technology.

Everyone loves the idea of ​​growing our own food, but few of us have the space, time or experience to devote to the task. It’s a bit like bread. It’s much harder than it seems.

Gardyn Studio 2 is designed to address these issues. It costs $549, with optional Monthly subscription $25 (Or $19 per month with a two-year plan.) This gets you Kelpie’s help, New seed pods Every month to keep your Garden growing, get discounts on plant foods, among other perks.

My Gardyn was up and running within 6 weeks, and I was able to cut my family of four’s weekly produce purchases in half, easily covering the monthly subscription. Plus, I really enjoy that every time I go to get something from Gardyn, it’s fresh and ready, not slushy in my fridge. I’ve also found that I create much less food waste.

The Studio 2 is the latest model from Gardyn and is a smaller version of its flagship product, the $900 Jardin Home. The studio has space for 16 plants (compared to 30 at home) and is a redesign of First studiowhich launches in 2024. The studio’s concept addresses customer feedback that Gardyn Home produced so many products that small families couldn’t keep up, and that their volume was too big, founder and CEO FX Rouxel told me.

Studio 2 is used New columns Which requires less maintenance, an upgraded camera with higher resolution, and a wider field of view to better monitor their shipments. There is also a new sunrise/sunset lighting mode for the large 60 LED bulb which helps garden grow.

the Columns It’s what makes Gardyn unique among indoor plant systems (I haven’t tried any of them). It’s a patented vertical hydroponic system that Roxell describes as “the most compact way to grow food at home.”

The special yCube seed pods that are used Rock wool As a growing medium it fits into poles placed on a large water tank with a pump inside and an attractive wooden lid. The LED strip with built-in camera is located in front of the plants, facing the wall (so no photos will be taken of you, just the plants, every 30 minutes).

The Gardyn comes with straps to secure the system to the wall, where full plants might cause it to fall. A button at the bottom allows you to quickly turn the light on or off, and you can also schedule this in the Gardyn app.

Assembling the Gardyn was easy and took about 20 minutes. It came with a 16-seed starter kit called Chef’s Favorites, including herbs like thyme, basil and lemon balm, plus celery, collard greens, green tatsoi, spinach, Salanova and yellow chard. There were also sunflowers.

I inserted the pods using the app to determine the best placement for each and sat back and let Gardyn do the rest. Other than increasing the water based on the Kelpie’s prompts in the app and adding some plant food, I didn’t have to do anything else until four weeks later, when I was told to clean the tank and check the roots.

One of the challenges for Gardyn is finding a place that works for her. At 1.4 square feet wide and about 5 feet high, it takes up quite a lot of space. While the kitchen would be the logical place, the light is too bright for an open-plan space. You can adjust the timing of the light, but Jardine recommends 14-16 hours of full light per day. I ended up putting it in the dining room off the kitchen.

Once the plants started budding, Kelpie told me to prune a few to encourage vigorous plants, and within a couple of weeks, I had my first crop of little shoots, making a delicious, if unusual, salad.

Harvesting became more labor intensive as things really started to grow; The green tatsoi was walking like gangs and began to block the light of some of the grasses. I’ve done a little strategic reshaping of the pods, along with a lot of harvesting – it’s been great as a substitute for bok choy.

I can see why people wanted a smaller garden, although I think if I had more plants that I used regularly it would be a little easier.

I had two pods that never sprouted, and my oxblood beets didn’t seem to do much, so I replaced them with three new pods, including green beans, cherry tomatoes, and strawberries. (These must be started outside of the Gardyn as they cannot eat plant food until they sprout). Obviously they will take longer to display their goods, although I did get at least one serving of green beans within a month.

It will take some fine-tuning to determine which plant combination best suits my needs. At this point, I’m leaning toward a combination of herbs, salad greens, cherry tomatoes, and chard. I can see that once you get a solid course that matches your culinary habits, Gardyn could replace most of your fresh produce purchases.

I am also experimenting with growing mature plants in my garden. However, there, they would be at my mercy and away from the watchful eye of the Kelpie. I was surprised to find that Gardyn’s AI assistant was very useful. I basically did what I had failed to do in my time as a master plant killer – monitor and care for the plants, getting help every now and then in adding water, planting food, thinning shoots, harvesting, pruning roots, and other actions to encourage growth.

Now, if you’re more interested and attuned to plants than I am, you can do a lot of this yourself, but if you’re a novice or loser like me, a kelpie seems fairly necessary.

Roxell explained that AI models process data from temperature, humidity and water sensors, along with images of plants, to calculate how quickly plants are growing and optimize variables to promote healthy growth. “It’s like having a master gardener by your side 24/7, always watching what’s going on, taking action where he can, and when he can’t, letting you know what to do,” he says.

If you cancel your Kelby subscription after your free month-long trial, you can continue to grow plants, automate watering and lighting on a schedule you can customize, plus purchase new yCubes directly from the Gardyn app starting at $5 per plant.

I enjoyed using Jardin, and everything I grew tasted delicious. It does require some maintenance, but it’s a lot less than growing anything from scratch myself. It remains to be seen whether my plan to grow vegetables in my garden will work. If so, I would be more inclined to invest in this. But for anyone who loves the idea of ​​having fresh vegetables, fruits, flowers and herbs in their home, Garden is a truly foolproof system.

Photos by Jennifer Pattison Toohey/The Verge