A vertical garden for the patio
Most gardens fail in the water — too much, too little, nutrients drifted out of range — and the plants never look right. Garden of Eaten measures the water every second and corrects it on its own, so the plants stay healthy and you keep the part you wanted: watching things grow, and dinner.
Notification list. No deposit, no date.
The part you wanted
This is what people picture when they buy a garden: stepping outside before dinner and coming back with the salad. A few plants that look the way the seed packet promised. Something to check on in the morning with a coffee, because it is doing well and it is yours.
Nothing you grow has been sprayed unless you sprayed it. And nothing goes soggy in a bag at the back of the refrigerator: you pick what you need, when you need it, and the rest keeps growing until you do. A head of lettuce is at its best in the ten minutes after it is cut. The one from the store was cut last week. A tower on a patio takes a few square feet, not a yard.
What you do. Drop a seedling into a pot. Come back and pick. Now and then, refill three bottles and let the screen walk you through a probe check.
What you do not do. Test the water. Read a chart. Measure from bottles. Guess. Nothing to test, nothing to measure, nothing to mix — the controller does the chemistry, every second, and shows you what it did.
Small space, real garden
Twenty lettuces in the ground want a bed about four feet by five. On a tower the same twenty grow one above another, on a footprint about the size of a bar stool, four feet tall. A patio has room for that. So does a balcony.
Each segment holds three or four plants around its circumference and locks a sixth of a turn from the one below, so the sites spiral up the column and every plant gets its own light. The tower in the box is five segments. Add more towers on the same reservoir when you want more; our own setup ran six.
| Towers | Plant sites | Floor space | Bed it replaces |
|---|---|---|---|
| One | 15–20 | about 1.7 sq ft | 15–20 sq ft |
| Two | 30–40 | about 3.5 sq ft | 30–40 sq ft |
| Three | 45–60 | about 5 sq ft | 45–60 sq ft |
| Six | 90–120 | about 10 sq ft | 90–120 sq ft |
Five segments per tower, three or four sites per segment, all towers on one reservoir and one controller. Taller towers and a five-site segment are in testing; we will publish them when the pump has proved it can lift to the top.
The six-tower row is not a projection. We ran six towers on one reservoir through a season on the previous version and ate from it — more than a household gets through — before we built the controller you are reading about. Our current demonstration tower is the smaller case: romaine and a second lettuce, cilantro, and green onions, nineteen plants on five segments.
Why gardens fail
Ask anyone who gave up on a garden and the story is the same: the plants never looked healthy. Too much water or too little. Feed that was too strong, or ran out, or was the wrong kind for the week. A tower moves the whole thing into water, which makes it simpler — and less forgiving. The nutrient concentration and the acidity have to sit inside a narrow band, and the tank has to stay full as the plants drink. Get any of the three wrong for a few days and lettuce bolts, strawberries scorch at the tips, roots rot.
The other towers leave that to you: dip a pen, read a chart, pour from bottles, wait, test again. Garden of Eaten has the instrument built in. Five sensors read the water and the air; three small pumps put in exactly what is missing, in the right order; a valve keeps the tank full. The plants get the water they would have if a chemist checked on them every second — because, in effect, one does.
On the wall
A touchscreen on the controller shows the water and the air as they are right now, what it dosed and when, and a chart of the last hour, day, week or month. You can leave it alone for weeks; you can also look at it every morning. Most people do the second one.
Drawn from the controller's own screen layout; readings are illustrative. The production unit carries the same interface on a 7-inch daylight-readable panel.
Under the lid
The automation, for those who want to know what is doing the work.
01
You stop testing water. The controller reads pH, conductivity, water temperature, water level and the air around the plants, compares each to its setpoint, and doses — a few millilitres at a time, then waits and reads again. Every reading and every dose is on the screen, with a chart of the last hour, day, week or month.
02
Calcium and phosphate never meet at concentrate strength. Nutrient A and Nutrient B have their own bottles, their own pumps, their own tubes, and enter the reservoir 110 mm apart. The controller doses A, lets the water settle, doses B, settles again, and only then corrects the pH — never acid into unmixed water. It was designed by a chemist who has spent a career keeping salts in solution.
03
It lives outside. The production housing is sealed to an IP65 design target, mounts to a wall, and takes every cable on an industrial plug-in connector you cannot put in the wrong port. Probes unplug for calibration in seconds. The screen is 7 inches and readable in daylight.
Production unit
04
Everything runs on the unit. No hub, no subscription, no account needed to grow. If the Wi-Fi drops, the plants don't notice. If the power drops, the pumps stop and the fill valve closes on its own — nothing floods — and it picks up where it left off when the power returns.
05
A matte black housing, a Roman-capital wordmark, brushed metal fittings and considered proportions. It belongs on the patio, not hidden behind it.
How it works
What arrives
The controller and dosing unit, one nutrient reservoir with its lid, and one tower of five segments. Segments come with two, three or four plant sites and mix on one column; every joint is the same quarter-turn bayonet.
Add a second tower, or a fifth, on the same reservoir and the same controller — we have run six. Choose the segments for what you grow — a few large sites for peppers and strawberries, more small ones for herbs and greens. There is nothing else to buy to start, and no cartridges to keep buying.
Tower and reservoir are printed in-house in PETG for the first units.
Where it stands
The control loop — the sensing, the dosing logic, the refill, the interlocks and the touchscreen — has been running on our engineering rig since spring. The production unit is in build now. We publish every specification with a status tag until it passes a seven-day soak with plants and no faults, and we will not take an order before it does.
We are building the production unit now. Leave an address and we will write when it passes its seven-day soak — once, plainly, with the price. No deposit. No date we cannot keep.
