About

The instrument the towers leave out

Garden of Eaten started with a simple irritation. The towers on the market are good planters and poor instruments: they will hold your plants and pump your water, and leave you to keep that water within a tenth of a pH unit by hand.

It was designed by a medicinal organic chemist with a career in controlled-environment agriculture and extraction chemistry — someone for whom "calcium and phosphate must not meet at concentrate strength" is not a line from an instruction sheet but a thing that has ruined a tank in front of him. The dosing order, the settle windows, the separate entry points and the nutrients-before-acid rule come from that experience. So does the decision to use industrial probes rather than hobby modules, and geared peristaltic pumps that can hold a one-millilitre shot.

The engineering is recorded, decision by decision, with the alternatives that were rejected. That is partly habit and partly the reason we can publish a specification sheet with a status on every row: we know which numbers have been measured and which are still targets, and we would rather tell you than round up.

What we do not claim

That your plants will grow faster, or bigger, or be better for you. We have no data for that and we are not going to invent it. What we claim is narrower and testable: the water in the tank will be measured every second and corrected on its own, in the right order, and the machine will refuse to do the things that flood patios and crust tubing.

The company

Garden of Eaten is a small company in Orange County, California. Early units are built in small numbers, and the first ones will be found in nurseries and hydroponics shops around us, running, before they are anywhere else.