Welcome to the second article of our AeroGarden review series! In our last post, AeroGarden: Going Green and Eating Clean – A Review, we discussed our reasoning for selecting the 24XL Farm Aerogarden model and the additional supplies we purchased.
In this post, we will be sharing our experience with constructing the AeroGarden and starting to grow our first plants. When our 24XL Farm AeroGarden model arrived, we couldn’t have been more excited!
Our first step was, of course, setting up the AeroGarden. This process was both easy and complicated at times.
The simple part of the setup was that the instruction manual was very straightforward to understand and follow. The steps listed were few in number. Most were easy to accomplish. The difficulty with the setup came in trying to screw in some of the bolts.
We found aligning the Aerograden so that all the bolts would fit was near impossible and ended up excluding several of the bolts from our installation. Regardless, the model is still very sturdy. The exclusion of a few bolts does not seem like it will be an issue for us during our growing experience.
After setup, we waited a few days and decided to start growing our seed pods. We selected the Heirloom Greens Seed Pod Set. The 24XL Farm AeroGarden model has two grow boxes that each can contain two gallons of water. We filled each with a ratio of two-thirds filtered water and one-third tap water.
We added 0.5 oz, of our Ocean Solution 2-0-3 plant food, per gallon of water.
Finally, we want to keep our cats out of the AeroGarden and lettuce plants, so we also set up our Expanding Willow Trellis. It was the perfect size for the 24XL Farm AeroGarden model. The trellis came with small, black zip ties which were the perfect size for and matched the AeroGarden perfectly.
