Zooey Deschanel’s Subscription Hydroponic Service Wants You to Grow 20% of Your Food
Over the past few years, actress Zooey Deschanel and her husband, producer Jacob Pechenik, have been constructing a food delivery service—sort of.
The culmination of their work is the Austin, Texas-based company Lettuce Grow—a subscription-based home hydroponics system.
Here’s how it works. You buy what the company is calling a “farmstand,” which is a vertical hydroponic system, not unlike other products like the Tower Garden. Then you subscribe to a delivery—the packages vary based on size, frequency, and contents—which brings you seedlings. You pop the seedlings in the farmstand, they grow to maturity, you harvest, you eat, a new delivery of seedlings arrives.
The farmstands come in three sizes: small (24 ports, at $399), medium (30 ports, $439), and large (36 ports, $469). The plans cost between $49 and $69 per month, and the company says the setups will yield roughly $78 (small), $102 (medium), and $124 (large) worth of food per month. The farmstand itself is made, the company says, from recycled ocean plastic. As is common for hydroponic setups like this, there are plenty of herbs and greens in the catalog, but there are also eggplants, tomatoes, peppers, and edible flowers.
According to Austin360, the idea is for this system to replace about 20 percent of your monthly food. It’s designed to be as simple as possible: no dirt, no growing seedlings, no leaving the house at all, really. You’ll pay for that convenience—none of this is particularly cheap—but it’s available now, nationwide, and the level of convenience might make this all worthwhile for many.
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by Dan Nosowitz, Modern Farmer
May 22, 2019
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It’s a really cool idea! The only problem is for 50 to $70 a month and you only get $100 worth of food you’re really not getting a good deal or a good turnaround for your money I probably don’t spend more than $50 a month on produce her so unfortunately wouldn’t be worth it for me
Great idea but not sure why it has to be so expensive. I don’t think the average person could afford it.
I want more info
That’s nice if you live in California like she does. It’s not possible to grow anything in the winter time in Michigan unless you do it indoors which require electricity and heat. It’s cheaper to buy it at the supermarket.
I want more information about this matter for growing food at my two separate properties at Indore city India.