Review: Plantaform Smart Indoor Garden

This past winter, Plantaform’s new smart indoor garden arrived at my Brooklyn home. I was excited at the prospect of growing heads of leafy green lettuce, channeling my inner Mark Watney, the left-on-Mars botanist in The Martian. Like many apartment dwellers, I don’t have access to a backyard garden, and even if I did, it was below freezing outside. The giant, space-age-egg growing system promised low effort with high yields using Plantaform’s innovative fogponics watering system.

Similar to aeroponic systems, where roots are suspended and sprayed with a nutrient-rich spray, Plantaform employs ultrasonic foggers to generate the visible, “nutrient-rich” fog that hydrates the roots and plants, rather than traditional nozzles or sprinklers. At $750, Plantaform’s indoor garden is not to be confused with the tabletop gardens that proliferate on Amazon, even though it's closer in size to those than similarly priced competitors like Gardyn or Rise.

On Your Mark

Photograph: Lisa Wood Shapiro

Billed as “the first smart indoor garden to use ‘innovative’ fog technology," Plantaform features an omniscient app that guides your every move: when to take the caps off the germinating plant pods, when to refill the tanks, and most important, when to harvest. There’s no guesswork, and there are seven plant packs to choose from: lettuce mix, cherry tomato mix, cocktail mix, herb essentials, leafy mix, edible flowers mix, and superfood salad mix that includes chard, bok choy, and kale. At $29 a box, the 15-pod kit looks like a tray of thinner Keurig capsules. Unfortunately, Plantaform's growing cycles are unique to each kit, so tomatoes cannot be mixed with flowers or lettuce and so on.

It takes a great deal of plastic to form the bulky 2-foot-tall egg with a difficult-to-grasp circumference of over 70 inches. I wish it had wheels and handles. It took less than 50 minutes from unboxing to pairing the app, including assembly, scooping the plant nutrients into the pitcher, filling the lower and upper water tanks, snapping the plant pods into their respective holes, and covering each pod with its germinating cover. Plantaform recommends using distilled or reverse osmosis filtered water for best results, as the Plantaform has no internal filter. I went with tap water. I live in New York City, known for some of the best tap water in the United States. And while photos on Plantaform’s website made me think it was an airtight system, there are air vents cut into the four loose-fitting magnetic windows. I placed the Plantaform in my sons’ room. The app told me I had 45 days till harvest.

Room to Breathe

Fourteen out of the 15 pods sprouted, and after a few days the app instructed me to remove the germinating caps as it entered its growing phase. The Plantaform requires 14 hours of straight LED grow-light time. When my son came home from college, I changed the timing from a 6 am start to 8 am start, so as not to wake him up. If you live in a studio, the long light cycle may be something to consider. At first, all seemed to be going according to plan. The app would keep track of days till harvest and when I needed to refill the water tanks, which wasn’t often.

Photograph: Lisa Wood Shapiro

It was about a week into my journey as a hydroponic lettuce farmer when I noticed my Mila air purifier, set to auto mode, was running at full blast. Its internal air quality sensor told me the air was dirty. Not sure if the sensor was overly sensitive, I swapped it out for the more powerful and far quieter IQ Air Atem X (9/10 WIRED Recommends) and set it on auto mode. Next time I went into my son’s room, the Atem was running at its highest speed. I checked the room’s IQAir Visual Pro Indoor Air Quality Monitor and noticed it was reading a higher-than-usual PM 2.5. For context, my sons’ room’s air quality index is usually in the teens or below, and that’s with my air purifiers running at their lowest, almost inaudible, setting.

It was at this point that I moved several other air quality monitors into my sons’ room. I noticed that there was a smaller uptick in PM 2.5 in other areas of my apartment as well. I took screenshots of my air monitor’s dashboard graphs and noticed that when the Plantaform’s grow lights were turned off from 10 pm to 8 am, the air quality improved. This happened every night, and I could see it on the various graphs from my consumer air quality monitors. I don’t pretend to be Berkeley Lab, but I’ve been covering air quality long enough to watch for patterns. I knew that Plantaform was using its fogponics system.

I had seen Plantaform’s cofounder and CEO, Alberto Aguilar, claiming, “NASA tech is going to revolutionize your kitchens … using NASA’s fogponic technology … ” on Canada’s equivalent of Shark Tank, known as Dragons’ Den. I was naive and hadn’t considered how a hydroponics system could impact my indoor air. I began to wonder if the monitors were picking up increased moisture. I’ve tested humidifiers in the past that impacted indoor air quality—maybe it was moisture.

I reached out to Plantaform to ask how their system impacts indoor air quality. They emailed back to say it might be because my air quality monitor was too close to the Plantaform, or the fogponics was impacting the humidity. Most of my indoor air quality monitors also measure humidity, and they were showing fairly constant levels of humidity. It did not mirror what was happening with the PM 2.5. The company also confirmed that the foggers continue to run at a reduced level during the night cycle.

Courtesy of Lisa Wood Shapiro

Courtesy of Lisa Wood Shapiro

Courtesy of Lisa Wood Shapiro

I still couldn’t control my indoor air quality. And if I unplugged my IQAir Atem air purifier, the indoor air quality shot up above 150. For context, the NCAA will consider rescheduling events if the air quality index rises above 200. It was around this time that I remembered the included powder plant nutrients I scooped into the water. Plantaform’s own container lists it as fertilizer in the fine print. Their own warning label says, “If inhaled, move person to fresh air. If inhalation occurs or persists, get medical attention.” I looked up each ingredient. Soluble potash, boron, and fer are a few that can lead to health issues when inhaled.

I began to look at my growing lettuce with worry. I opened the window in the bedroom and was glad my boys were off at college. During the past two weeks of growing, I had developed my annual chest cold and asthma, though the hypochondriac in me worried that my giant egg growing lettuce might not be helping. I’m sure I sounded crazy when I mentioned the hydroponic lettuce egg to my primary care provider, who assured me that it seemed like my usual upper respiratory infection.

Health Concerns

I shut the boys’ bedroom door and found myself looking into some of the health risks of those exposed to indoor hydroponic growing systems, like childhood hypersensitivity pneumonitis (HP) or extrinsic allergic alveolitis—"farmer’s lung," or “pigeon breeder’s lung.” In reading the above linked study about a 14-year-old girl who developed HP due to an indoor hydroponic system, it was noted that they tested a water sample from the hydroponic system and found that Aureobasidium pullulans was the dominant fungal microorganism.

When I emailed Plantaform and asked if there was a water filter in the tank, they wrote back, “Plantaform does not include a built-in water filter, so the device uses the exact water you pour in to generate the fog that nourishes your plants.”

Photograph: Lisa Wood Shapiro

I reached out to the home water testing company My Tap Score to test the water in the Plantaform. While, at the Plantaform app’s command, I filled the tank several times during its growing cycle, I hadn’t drained or cleaned it. My Tap Score ran a total microbiology water test on samples from my tap water (first thing in the morning) and samples drawn from lower water tank in the Plantaform. The tap water results detected two types of algae commonly found in drinking water, while the Plantaform samples detected both fungi and bacteria, and while most healthy people wouldn’t have issues with the microorganisms found in the tank, there were several that could impact those with weakened immune systems, like the detected Burkholderia cepacia, that the lab report described as “an opportunistic pathogen that may cause respiratory infections in immunocompromised individuals or those with chronic lung diseases.”

When I emailed the Plantaform team about the findings from the microbiology water test, they wrote back noting that the conditions of my testing could significantly influence the results. They added that tap water varies throughout the day and could be the source of contamination.

“Burkholderia cepacia is commonly found in soil, water, and on plant matter. It’s also worth noting that if this bacteria had come from our production line, it would not have survived on dry surfaces for the several weeks typically involved in storage and shipping of the Indoor Garden," the team said. "Some strains of B. cepacia are not harmful to humans and are even known to promote plant growth.” And all of this could be true. After watching the PM 2.5 numbers increase on my indoor air quality monitors each time the Plantaform grow lights were on, I wasn’t as concerned about where B. cepacia originated, but could the fogponics system release droplets that contain bacteria? Also, the chance of the home user contaminating the Plantaform water tank is high. Plantaform also wrote in their response, “even the physical tap or surrounding environment (e.g., open windows, dust, unwashed hands, etc.) could be sources of contamination.”

By this point the lettuce looked ready to harvest, but being a good indoor farmer, I didn’t want to question the app. Plantaform told me that the app is connected to sensors and isn’t time-based, as in following a prescribed number of days. I wanted to start trimming the bright green leaves off the heads to make salads, but I wasn’t sure if that would mess up the harvest. Though several days before harvest, some of the leaves began to brown and wilt. Fourteen pods grew into five different types of Romaine lettuce. It took under two hours to harvest, break down the Plantaform, and clean it with a solution of food-grade hydrogen peroxide and water. The most challenging part was pulling the roots out of the inner tower. I gave three heads of lettuce to friends who made salad and told me that the lettuce looked and tasted delicious. The leaves of lettuce were nearly debris-free, and I triple-washed them in a salad spinner before eating. If I were to use the Plantaform to grow lettuce again, I’d trim leaves as soon as they looked ready. I wouldn’t wait for a harvest notification. It was too much lettuce to eat all at once. I think I could have stretched out lettuce harvesting over several weeks.

Would I recommend the Plantaform? If you have space in a basement or garage, then yes, it might be worth the investment, especially during the winter months and/or if you live above the arctic circle where fresh produce is hard to come by. But there’s a paradox: Those who lack access to a plot of land to grow food are the same people who might not have a garage or basement to keep a Plantaform in their home. I wouldn’t recommend it for an apartment, even if you have air purifiers. All and all, I spent under five hours working on my indoor lettuce farm. And within an hour of unplugging the Plantaform, the indoor PM 2.5 number returned to the teens or below in the boys’ room and has stayed in that area ever since.