Lettuce Grow Farmstand review: A hydroponic garden fit for beginners

I used to have a black thumb, but I wanted a green one so badly. The Lettuce Grow Farmstand granted my wish and turned me into a gardening obsessive.

Nearly six months into testing the Lettuce Grow Farmstand, a vertical hydroponic planter that can grow greens indoors or out, I've blossomed into a full-on plant enthusiast. I've watched hours of YouTube videos about seedlings, fallen down internet rabbit holes to find the best way to cut plants, run weekly pH tests on my plants' water, and given my lettuce encouraging pep talks.

If you take out the leafy greens, the $348-to-start Lettuce Grow looks like home decor you'd find at IKEA, or a futuristic bean bag game. It's basically a big vase that cycles through water stored in its base and holds 12 to 36 plants in round cubbies that stack on top of one another in modular rings. The Farmstand grows anything from lettuce to cilantro to boy choy to tomatoes to squash to strawberries to oregano and so on. It's about 4 feet to 6 feet tall depending on how many plants you want and nearly 2 feet wide at the base.

I've had immense success growing plants indoors with my Farmstand, so much so that I regularly hand out bushels of cilantro, thyme, and lettuce to whoever will take it. My fridge currently has five containers full of greens, and I gave my neighbor a quart-sized bag of cilantro one recent morning. I love the Lettuce Grow, but it has its shortcomings, which I'll spend most of this review dissecting. If you can live with its foibles and don't mind the hefty price tag, you'll love it, too.

Home gardeners have been increasingly buying hydroponic systems like the Farmstand, especially as the COVID pandemic forced many of us to stay home and find new hobbies. On a commercial scale, enthusiasts envision large-scale vertical hydroponics as the future of farming. They provide an alternative to traditional farming — hydroponics use less water, less land, and can grow year-round indoors, in unexpected locations. They're also a way to address climate change and food security, proponents say, though their impact has been minimal so far.

Hydroponic gardening uses very little soil; instead, plants rely on a well of nutrient-enhanced water, like what's in the base of the Farmstand. Hydroponic plants slurp up water spiked with scoopfuls of fertilizer to prompt root and leaf growth. Rather than their roots growing outward in soil in search of food, they grow long, mimicking everyone who skipped haircuts during the pandemic. The energy plants save from letting their roots hang loose lets them grow faster.

I was shocked by how fast my first round of plants grew on the Farmstand, which wets all the plants' roots on the various levels by cycling the same water over and over through a pump. When I got it in December, I already had raised garden beds in my backyard. What took about three months to grow outside, took just one in the Farmstand.

To be fair, the lettuce planted outside grew from seeds and the lettuce inside grew from seedlings provided by Lettuce Grow. Seedlings give you about a three-week head start. The indoor lettuce also didn't have to contend with shorter winter days because of grow lights. Still, I was thoroughly impressed with the Farmstand's first crop.

If you use the Farmstand indoors, Lettuce Grow suggests installing grow lights, which it calls "glow rings" and sells for an additional $200 to start. The lights are on for a minimum of 14 hours. Lettuce Grow says the extra electricity costs about 15 cents per day; I haven't noticed much of an uptick on my electricity bills.

The grow lights and watering system are both on timers, which you adjust based on temperature and location. For my indoor setup, the water runs for 15 minutes every hour during the day and every two hours at night. A calming, babbling brook this is not. It sounds like a running toilet. Don't put the Farmstand inside if you live in a studio or have thin walls. You'll hear the water run every few hours as you sleep. I have mine in a separate room, and if I forget to close the door at night, it's an annoying trudge out of bed to shut out the loud trickling.

Beyond the noise, there are a few other quirks, including gnats. After a few weeks of having the Farmstand indoors, I was constantly clapping to unsuccessfully catch gnats. To control the gnats, Lettuce Grow suggests Mosquito Bits to shake into the base and Neem Oil to spray on the plants. The dual approach worked after a few weeks, but when I got new seedlings, the gnats returned. I learned to quarantine the seedlings for a few days in a separate room, spritzing them with Neem Oil to fend off whatever gnat eggs may be lurking in the soil.

Around the same time as the gnats emerged, a pond scum smell developed. Smelly microorganisms love the Farmstand's nutrients as much as the plants. To get rid of the stench, Lettuce Grow suggested tossing in a few tablespoons of hydrogen peroxide into the base water. That worked! You only fully refill the base with water every four months after you give it a thorough clean, but you may need to top it off with a gallon or three each week, depending on how big and thirsty your plants get.

You also need to add a scoopful each of two kinds of provided fertilizers and run a pH test weekly. If your pH is too high, you add a powder to calm it down. Water that's high in pH can yellow your leaves and make it harder for the plants to absorb nutrients. I was nervous about my first pH test — remember that black thumb! — but now actually enjoy them. They make me feel like a botanist, even though I'm far from a plant expert.

I didn't test the Farmstand outside, but all my gripes would be irrelevant outdoors. However, I did take the Farmstand outside to do a deep clean, or reset, as Lettuce Grow calls it.

Lettuce Grow recommends removing all your plants, taking apart the modular rings, scrubbing them down, emptying all the water from the base, and starting fresh every four months. When I cleaned mine, I didn't replace all my plants, but I did give all their roots haircuts. This is fine and actually recommended; they'll grow back!

If you live in an upstairs apartment without an elevator or don't have access to clean your Farmstand outdoors, the Farmstand isn't for you. You also need a hose to pump out the base water and refill it with a fresh round.

While cleaning, I had a tough time breaking apart the modular rings and grow lights, which click together with a twist. After some elbow grease and grunting, I got it to unlatch. Inside, I found a lot of root matter and muck that I scrubbed away with a sponge, soap, and water. Blue algae on one of the seals wouldn't come off no matter how tough I got with the sponge, though. I had the same issue with brown gunk on the filtration system, which Lettuce Grow says was caused by minerals in the water and was nothing to worry about. Unfortunately, after my cleanup, I had a mysterious leak for a few days. I eventually figured out that I didn't push a water seal in enough when reassembling, d'oh. Otherwise, everything operated fine when reassembled despite the cleaning hiccups.

The Farmstand was easier to put together after the cleaning than it was to take apart, or even assemble the first time around. When I first took all the parts out of the many boxes it came in, I was overwhelmed by all the steps. If you're good at building IKEA furniture or Lego sets, it'll likely be a breeze, but I'm not.

Despite my troubles, Lettuce Grow in general has great informational videos on its YouTube channel. It also has an app, but there's not much there besides a shopping section and a tool to identify plants. The Plant ID feature misidentified my kale as cilantro and oregano as green beans, but it got spinach and various lettuces right.

Like Apple, Lettuce Grow is a hardware company at heart with a subscription revenue stream. You buy the Farmstand and the glow rings to start, but you also purchase new seedlings every few months. At $12 for six, plus $8.99 for shipping, the seedlings add up. I started to grow my own seedlings, but I had to buy a whole other set up for that, including seeds, plant-starter plugs, and a self-watering seed tray. (I tried an egg carton hack, but kept forgetting to water my seeds and only a few sprouted.) I'd been mulling over buying a portable grow light, but then was so overwhelmed by options that I just paid for another round of seedings from Lettuce Grow instead. Lettuce Grow's seedlings cost more, but save you time and brainpower.

While I've had immense success with lettuce and herbs indoors, I failed to grow strawberries and cucumbers. I didn't realize the cucumbers I planted would need pollination (I grew them from seed). Without any bees inside, I tried to hand pollinate, but it didn't work. My cucumbers looked like premature gherkins fit for a hamster. Lettuce Grow says its strawberries are for indoor planting, but when they bloomed, mine looked like angry pimples. Called nubs in the gardening world, these malformed strawberries could be caused by poor pollination or a nutrient deficiency.

For indoor gardeners, I recommend buying some accessories, including a 1-gallon watering can to refill your base every week, these little scissors (which you should clean with alcohol after trims), a labeler or some popsicle sticks, and a plant dolly so you can move your heavy Farmstand around, like when you need to push it outside to clean or just trim plants in the back if you have it against a wall.

All the accessories I bought cost about $150. Adding that to the 24-plant Farmstand and the glow rings, which were provided for review and total $849, that's almost $1,000. The smallest, 12-plant Farmstand with glow rings will run you $548.

Lettuce Grow, cofounded by actor Zooey Deschanel and producer Jacob Pechenik, has plenty of competitors, which I haven't tried. The least expensive is Click & Grow, which is $599.95 for a 27-plant Smart Garden. The most expensive is the My Gardyn, which starts at $899 for a 30-plant Home Starter Kit. Falling in between is the Aerograden, which is $795 for the Farm24 Plus, which accommodates two dozen plants (it's on sale for $599.95 right now). Aerogarden and Click & Grow have smaller options that cost around $100, but they're not comparable in scope to the Farmstand.

If you have outdoor space with easy access to an outlet: Yes! Before getting my Farmstand, I'd been building up a pandemic garden outside. I have six garden beds, and if I could turn back time and had the cash, I'd replace them all with Farmstands and start a mini hydroponic urban farm. Plants grow faster in the Farmstand, it uses less water and space, and because of its curvaceous shape, I'd probably have fewer squirrels nabbing my plants.

If you have indoor space: Yes, but only if you're willing to buy all the indoor accessories, deal with the running toilet noise, experiment to control the gnats, and don't mind skipping cucumbers and other plants that need pollination (or are confident in your hand-pollinating skills).

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