They’ve Got The Hydroponics

Emery’s plants “The Gardyn” in it’s dining room

Emery’s restaurant likes to keep things fresh, and after the closure of the “Gathering Garden” they needed a new solution. With this new hi-tech hydroponic garden, it can’t get any fresher.

It’s ran by an intuitive program that closely regulates the light, watering, and growth of the plants.  It even sends alerts for things like when a seedling has sprouted, individual water levels, or if certain sprouts need to be removed to prevent over-crowding for proper growth.

Angie Rekasie, NIC’s Hospitality Instructor, says they’ve been unable to get it up and running for a year now, but they were determined to do so for this spring’s semester.

“We had to have IT come over and create a whole new domain for it. It regulates itself so it needs to be connected to the internet at all times.” Rekasie explains.

Created by a company named “The Gardyn,” this model does many things besides providing the correct amount of light. This model has the lights, plus two cameras, it’s own modem, a five gallon tank and 30 pods for planting.

“It does almost everything itself, but we’ll still have to do some pollinating by hand.” Rekasie says. 

“We set it all up last week and I got alerts over the weekend.  It said, ‘Congratulations!  You’ve got new sprouts, how exciting!’ It even sent me a zoomed in picture of the seedlings.” Hillary Ginepra, Instructor for the Culinary Arts Program, laughs. “It’s only been up and running for five days now, and we’ve already got this many sprouts.”

At least ten different plants have already begun to grow.  According to Ginepra, they expect sprouts to be supported by the pods until they’re fully grown.  She doesn’t anticipate any problems with the plants becoming too large as they will harvest them before they get to that point.