This smart garden turned my black thumb green

I can’t grow anything. Multiple attempts to create a cottage garden, first in Idaho and now in South Carolina, have brought disappointment. Both are challenging climates, but where others have succeeded, I’ve been left with little more than a pile of cherry tomatoes for my vast efforts (those things are bulletproof).

I’d all but given up on the idea of ever successfully growing my own food — I can’t even keep those pots of herbs you buy at the grocery store alive for more than a week — until I met the Gardyn Studio 2.

A smart indoor garden, the Gardyn Studio 2 is an automated growing platform that deploys AI to do what I failed to do: watch over and properly take care of my plants.

It works through a combination of hydroponic watering, automated lighting, a camera that captures plant images, and algorithms that analyze the plants’ growth stages and adapt. An AI assistant called Kelby, which requires a subscription, manages the light and water cycles, sends alerts when I need to intervene, and processes all the data from the Gardyn’s sensors and camera to help your plants grow.

It’s an impressive, albeit very expensive, system. In the three months I’ve had it in my home, I’ve grown a sunflower, a full kohlrabi, lots of basil, lettuce, green beans, chard, and some other tasty exotic veggies I’d never heard of. I am currently working on strawberries, cherry tomatoes, lavender, jalapeño peppers, and buttercrunch lettuce — in December, in my dining room. This is why I love technology.

Everyone loves the idea of growing their own food, but few of us have the space, time, or expertise to dedicate to the task. It’s a bit like baking; it’s a lot harder than it looks.

Gardyn Studio 2 is designed to address these problems. It costs $549, with an optional $25 monthly subscription (or $19 a month with a two-year plan). That gets you Kelby’s assistance, new seed pods every month to keep your Gardyn growing, and discounts on plant food, among other perks.

My Gardyn started producing within 6 weeks, and I was able to cut my family of four’s weekly produce buying in half, easily covering the monthly subscription. Plus, I really enjoy that every time I go to get something from the Gardyn, it’s fresh and ready, not wilted in my fridge. I’ve also found I generate far less food waste.

The Studio 2 is Gardyn’s newest model and is a smaller version of its flagship product, the $900 Gardyn Home. The Studio has space for 16 plants (compared to 30 on the Home) and is a redesign of the first Studio, which launched in 2024. The Studio concept addresses customer feedback that the Gardyn Home produced too much produce for smaller households to keep up with, and its footprint was too large, founder and CEO FX Rouxel told me.

The Studio 2 uses new columns that require less maintenance, an upgraded camera with higher resolution, and a wider field of view to better monitor its charges. There is also a new sunrise/sunset lighting mode for the large 60-LED lamp that helps the garden grow.

The columns are what make Gardyn unique among indoor plant systems (none of which I’ve tried). It’s a patented vertical growing, hydroponic system that Rouxel calls “the most compact way to grow food at home.”

Proprietary yCube seed pods that use rockwool as a growing medium fit into the columns, which sit on a large water tank with a pump inside and an attractive wooden lid. The strip of LED lights with a camera built in sits in front of the plants, facing the wall (so it’s not going to be snapping pictures of you, only the plants, every 30 minutes).

Gardyn comes with straps to anchor the system to the wall, as fully grown plants could cause it to topple. A button at the bottom lets you turn the light on or off quickly, and you can also schedule it in the Gardyn app.

Assembling Gardyn was straightforward and took about 20 minutes. It came with a starter kit of 16 seed pods called the Chef’s Favorites, including herbs such as thyme, basil, and lemon balm, as well as celery, collard greens, green tatsoi, spinach, salanova, and yellow chard. There was also a sunflower.

I inserted the pods using the app to determine the best position for each and sat back and let Gardyn do the rest. Other than topping up the water based on Kelby’s prompts in the app and adding some plant food, I didn’t have to do anything else until four weeks in, when I was told to clean the tank and check the roots.

One challenge of Gardyn is finding a suitable spot for it. At 1.4 square feet wide and about 5 feet tall, it takes up quite a lot of space. While the kitchen would be the logical place, the light is too bright for my open plan space. You can adjust the timing of the light, but Gardyn recommends 14-16 hours of full light per day. I ended up putting it in the dining room just off the kitchen.

Once the plants started to bud, Kelby told me to trim a few to encourage stronger plants, and within a couple of weeks, I had my first harvest of young sprouts, which made for a delicious, if unusual, salad.

Harvesting got more labor-intensive as things started to really grow; the green tatsoi was going like gangbusters and started blocking the light to some of the herbs. I did a bit of strategic reconfiguring of the pods, along with lots of harvesting — it was great as a bok choy substitute.

I can see why people wanted a smaller Gardyn, although I think if I had more plants I used regularly, it would be a bit easier.

I did have two pods that never sprouted, and my bull’s blood beets didn’t seem to be doing much, so I swapped them out for three new pods, including green beans, cherry tomatoes, and strawberries. (These needed to be started outside of the Gardyn as they can’t take plant food until they sprout). Those will obviously take longer to proffer their goods, although I got at least one serving of green beans within a month.

It will take some fine-tuning to determine which plant lineup works best for my needs. At this point, I’m leaning towards a combination of herbs, salad greens, cherry tomatoes, and chard. I can see that once you have a solid rotation that fits with your culinary habits, Gardyn could replace most of your fresh produce purchases.

I’m also experimenting with transplanting the mature plants into my garden. However, out there, they will be at my mercy and away from the watchful eye of Kelby. I was surprised to find Gardyn’s AI assistant was very useful. It basically did what I have failed to do in my time as a master plant killer — keep an eye on and take care of the plants, roping me in to help every now and then to add water, plant food, thin the sprouts, harvest, prune roots, and other actions to encourage growth.

Now, if you are more attentive and attuned to plants than I am, you could do much of this yourself, but if you are a beginner or a failure like me, Kelby feels fairly essential.

Rouxel explained that the AI models crunch data from temperature, humidity, and water sensors, along with images of the plants, to compute how fast the plants are growing and to optimize variables to promote healthy growth. “It’s like having a personal master gardener on your side 24/7, always monitoring what’s going on, taking action where it can, and when it cannot, it lets you know what to do,” he says.

If you opt out of Kelby after the free month’s trial, you can continue to grow plants and automate the watering and lighting on a schedule that you can customize, as well as buy new yCubes directly from the Gardyn app starting at $5 a plant.

I’ve enjoyed using the Gardyn, and everything I’ve grown has tasted delicious. It does require some maintenance, but far less than growing anything from scratch by myself. It remains to be seen if my plan to transplant veggies into my garden will be successful. If it is, I would be even more inclined to invest in this. But for anyone who likes the idea of having freshly grown vegetables, fruits, flowers, and herbs in their home, Garden really is a foolproof system.

Photos by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge