My Indoor Garden Experience – Gardyn Week 3

This last week I was pretty hands off with my Gardyn so I decided to take some time to start learning more about hybriponic growing. The Gardyn site has a lot of good information in their Gardyn Help Center. Here you can learn about planting, germination, grooming, harvesting, environmental factors, feeding, pollinating, etc. They also have lots of information on how to set up the Gardyn, how the system works and what type of maintenance you need to do and when. I’m getting towards the end of my free 30-day subscription so I’m trying to decide if I can maintain the system on my own without the assistance of Kelby. So far Kelby has prompted me to add plant food and thin my plants. The rest of the messages were more informational. Since I have gardening experience, I’m leaning toward not purchasing the subscription right now. My next steps will be learning how to do the cleaning and maintenance. Since there are instructions on the website, I think I can do it on my own. Not to mention, If I have questions, I can always reach out to my fellow Gardyners on the Facebook group. Besides, my plants are still growing and I have not harvested anything quite yet so I really don’t need 10 new plants quite yet. Plus I bought some of my own supplies in order to plant my own seeds in the system (See my previous posts for more information). 

I also noticed this last week while following along on the Gardyn Facebook group that other Gardyns seemed to be growing a bit faster than mine. Their day 10 looked better than my day 15. What the heck!! Since I live in the Sonoran Desert, I figured it had to so with our low humidity. Sure enough I learned about Vapor Pressure Deficit (VPD). VPD is a combined metric of air temperature and humidity which indicates how much pressure the air is exerting on the plants. This metric effects how much nutrients and water the plants use and how much photosynthesis of the light they produce. Ideal VPD should be between 1.0 – 1.5. They include the following website to calculate it at https://cals.arizona.edu/vpdcalc/. When I plugged in the temperature and humidity that the app Gardyn app measures for you, I got a VPD of 2.0. Having a high VPD can cause plants to exhibit signs of burning and stress. A low VPD can make the plants look deficient and pale.

My plants are looking pretty good so far but like I said, they appear to be growing a little slower and I do have one plant that looks a bit stressed. It appears that the temperature is too high and the humidity too low. I’m just placed a humidifier in front of my Gardyn and my humidity went from 27.7% to 52.4% putting me at a VPD of 1.2. I’m now in range so we’ll see how that helps!!