Review: Gardyn Indoor Hydroponic Garden

I'm in the midst of putting together a buying guide of indoor vertical gardening systems, and the Gardyn—the 30-plant Home 4.0, to be exact—was the first tester to arrive at my house. I had it unboxed and set up within a couple of hours, lights on and water pump running. I'm already a pro! I thought.

Sure enough, within a couple of weeks, all of Gardyn's proprietary seed-filled yCubes had sprouted, and a couple of weeks after that, I was harvesting bowlfuls of herbs and salad greens. Even though from setup to harvest the Gardyn required the use of about five brain cells, I was quite pleased with myself, despite having long ago given up gardening outdoors due to deer, rabbits, and my own incompetence with anything other than starts from the big-box store.

What I failed to understand, but would come to grasp with subsequent systems, was that indoor hydroponic gardening is just as hard in some ways as outdoor gardening. I had no way of knowing this, however, because Gardyn's pricey add-on app and AI gardening assistant, “Kelby,” had been doing all the real work via a network of sensors and live-view cameras (two on the larger Home model, one on the smaller Studio).

Easy Living

My new friend Kelby had been gathering data in order to set its own watering times, schedule its 60 LED lights, and send me the occasional customized task that never took longer than 10 minutes. And this customized maintenance isn't just helpful for convenience, as mold, bacteria, or roots clogging up the plumbing are extremely common in hydroponic gardening. Kelby told me when to add the needed nutrients (included) and how much to add, when and how to attend to the plants’ roots, and even when to harvest.

There's also remote monitoring, of course, and a vacation mode that keeps the plants in a sort of stasis. Most of the work on my end was simply me admiring my plants, and admire them I did. The first time I ever saw a Gardyn was a couple of years ago, in a Parade of Homes show house, adjacent to a floor-to-ceiling wine cabinet. “Wow, what is THAT?! I want one!” announced nearly every person who shuffled by in their paper booties. Even in a $2 million spec house, the lit-up display of lush herbs, flowers, and vegetables was a showstopper.

When I began testing other systems, I was feeling quite big for my britches. At this point, I had successfully grown sunflowers, lemon balm, and even an entire kohlrabi. I've got this! Within five minutes of opening the other systems' boxes and finding pH test strips and vials, manual-dial timers, and multiple bags of supplements, however, I realized I did not have this. In fact, I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. Gardyn had only made me think I knew what I was doing. And, according to founder FX Rouxel (pronounced F-X, like the initials), that's Gardyn's entire raison d'être.

Engineered Growth

You might expect the founder of a hydroponic gardening system to have an agricultural background (perhaps even a certain kind of agriculture), but Rouxel is a tech guy. Though he did once work for the French version of the Environmental Protection Agency, his most recent pre-Gardyn gig was at French IT company Capgemini, deploying cloud, automation, and AI technologies. Although he is also a parent, cook, and Ironman athlete, his passion lies in using technology to lower the entry barrier to growing your own food.

“With other systems, they're basically a pump on a timer," Rouxel told me during a recent interview. “You need to know what you're doing. We looked at, ‘Can we use AI to actually solve this problem?’ Unlike our competitors, we have a big chunk of the company that is just engineers." They make sure the Gardyn app is constantly adjusting through data collected via the system's two cameras and sensors that track water usage, humidity, temperature, and plant growth. If the system identifies an issue, it will send the user a specific task through the app to fix it.

Note that I did find the cameras to be slightly glitchy during the seven weeks I've been using the Gardyn, requiring periodic resets of the system to keep them both online. It didn't seem to affect any of my tasks or plant stats, but I found it irritating nonetheless. Though if I weren't using the Kelby feature, it wouldn't matter, as the cameras are essentially useless otherwise.

Another plus with the Gardyn is its shape. The footprint is significantly smaller than comparable systems—the 5-gallon recirculating water tank (it comes with a bottle of plant food designed to keep a balanced pH) takes up a rectangular 2 square feet for the Home, 1.4 for Studio. The PVC-like pipes (three on the Home, two on the Studio) have holes that are pointed at different angles, both to prevent crowding and to allow plants to grow tall, whereas on other systems, height is limited by overhead lights. Gardyn's lights instead run on rails in front of the plants. To take maximum advantage of the clearance, Gardyn also sells add-on trellises if you want to grow vining plants like cucumbers or miniature pumpkins.

I also like that Gardyn's yCubes use rockwool as a growth medium. I didn't think much of this until I began testing other systems that use peat pellets and learned the hard way that peat has a tendency to attract fungus gnats. The rockwool cubes come prestocked with one of about 120 different varieties of fruit, vegetable, herb, and flower seeds—from stevia and snapdragons to shishito peppers, lime basil, and wasabi microgreens. New GMO-free and heirloom varieties specially tested for the Gardyn are constantly being added to the lineup, Rouxel said. (Gardyn does have by far the most plant varieties among its competitors.)

Gardyn Studio comes with a 16-cube starter set, and Gardyn Home comes with 30—buyers can select either salad greens, flowers, or “chef faves.” I chose the latter, which included a lot of brassicas along with bunching onions, lettuces, and some interesting greens like sorrel. If one of the cubes doesn't sprout, Gardyn will replace it for free.

Convenience at a Cost

The downside to all this ease and automation is, of course, the Kelby-containing “membership” subscription, which is on top of the price of the unit itself. And it's a doozy—$408 a year, or $686 for two years. You can buy the Gardyn without it, but you won't have the automation or any of the ease-of-use features that guarantee success. The membership also includes 10 credits per month with free shipping to “buy” yCubes (which range from about one to three credits, or around $5 each), more plant food, accessories, or spare parts.

People do forgo the membership to jury-rig their own setups with their own seeds—Amazon sells 3D-printed knockoff yCubes for cheap—but judging from posts in the Gardyners Facebook group, problems abound with wilting, premature bolting, and pests. Upon creating an account in the app, there's a 30-day free trial of the membership, so there's at least the option to try the membership. As well as a 60-day return policy if you decide the whole shebang just isn't for you. (If you do, the warranty is two years.)

As for the cost, Rouxel said, Gardyn is actively trying to get it down, but in the meantime, the company is subsidizing a 0 percent APR on Affirm and Klarna: “We're actually paying the difference so everyone can get up to three years.”

Veteran hydroponic gardening nerds will scoff so hard at the idiot-proof Gardyn they might hurt themselves (like the one Redditor who declared it a toy for “coastal elite fart sniffers”), but I think there is a place for making the act of growing your own food as accessible as possible for every level of gardener, whether they live in an apartment with no yard or in an area where they can't grow food year round. And, of course, if you're a parent or caregiver, there's endless value in showing kids where their food comes from.

“I'm really amazed at the impact it has had on people's lives,” Rouxel said. “I'm a parent; I have two boys. What I want is for them to grow up as healthy adults with the right habits. And you know, when my boys left for college, they asked for a Gardyn for their dorms—that's when I knew I was doing something right.”