Aeroponic garden system takes edge off high produce prices for Sask. woman

The high price of fresh vegetables isn’t a concern for people who are able to grow their own through the winter.

Irene Forgie lives outside of Elrose in western Saskatchewan. While some people might be thinking twice about buying fresh green vegetables at the grocery store, she only has to walk downstairs to make a salad. She hasn’t noticed the price hike in fresh produce.

“Not so much because we have a tower garden to grow our own fresh greens,” she said.

But she isn’t surprised to see the price of vegetables spike after this summer.

“When I was looking at produce, I was thinking to myself, holy smokes, this is going to go through the roof because of the climate conditions and different areas that I know where people have been growing food and we’ve been importing it – they’re in a drought,” Forgie said.

This year she invested in a garden tower which uses an aeroponic gardening system to grow vegetables without soil. Aeroponic gardens are similar to hydroponic systems, but instead of growing directly in water, the root systems are exposed to air and sprayed with a mist of water and nutrients.

She says it only takes 20 gallons of water and you add nutrients directly to the water to help the plants grow.

Forgie says she started growing the current plants on Nov. 12 and she was able use them for Christmas dinner. She has a variety of kohlrabi, spinach, and purple beans and her next project is to try tomatoes.

Now Forgie is a sales rep for the Juice Plus company which sells this particular gardening system.

She says the system doesn’t use as much power as you might think, because you can use it in front of a window or with a lighting system. She uses lights and they run on a timer for 14 hours a day, but she hasn’t noticed a big difference in her power costs.

“That wasn’t important to me because I’m growing my own food. I’m saving money when I’m not driving because fuel costs me more than power,” Forgie said.