Gardening is an extremely therapeutic activity, and though I may not engage in it all the time, the few times that I have, I found it really delightful and soothing. Growing, tending to, and being surrounded by plants is intensely satisfying, all your worries slowly fade away, and you are simply enthralled by nature. However, not everyone has access to outdoor gardens, especially with the pandemic locking up most of us in our homes. Indoor gardening is a modern solution that works perfectly in our modern homes. From LG’s latest indoor gardening appliance that is 3 feet tall to an indoor vertical garden with a bio-filter, we have a myriad range of options when it comes to growing plants within the comfort of your home! These unique, innovative, and thoughtful designs promise to take care of all your indoor gardening needs. And I don’t know about you, but I’m really considering trying one of them out, I wouldn’t mind adding indoor gardening to my daily routine!
1. The LG tiiun
Designed as a unique home appliance that lets you grow your own herbs and veggies the LG tiiun was announced in the run-up to CES 2022. The indoor gardening appliance is roughly the size of a dorm refrigerator, standing at approximately 3 feet tall, and features two shelves that can accommodate up to 6 all-in-one seed packages and various seed kits. The term tiiun comes from the Korean word meaning ‘to sprout’ and is LG’s way of indicating that this appliance is an all-in-one self-sufficient garden. The appliance creates a perfect microclimate and all the right conditions for the plants to grow, even mimicking light cycles so you could potentially keep your tiiun anywhere in a room without worrying about access to proper sunlight.
2. Vertex Zero
Requiring no water for maintenance, Vertex Zero is a terrarium that encases real, biologically inactive moss, cultivated in TerraLiving’s own greenhouse and preserved in labs, inside museum-grade geometric glass containers. Live mosses are grown and cultivated in TerraLiving’s greenhouse dubbed the “Moss Lab,” before reaching the peak of their health and preserved for encasement. Using proprietary advanced preservation technology, each patch of live moss is stripped of any water content in low-pressure zones and subzero temperatures to freeze their proteins and biological components, rendering them inactive, but frozen in time.
3. Planterior
A LEGO-inspired indoor garden called Planterior by designer Dasol Jeong merges LEGO’s building blocks with the frame of a bulletin board to create a unique, modular garden system for any WFH space. Planterior keeps the shape and size of a traditional bulletin board and integrates a gardening system into its structure to bring greenery to any workspace. Describing Planterior’s inspiration in their own words, Dasol notes, “Due to the influence of fine dust and COVID-19, people, who do not have the opportunity to access plants outdoors, are increasingly putting plants into their homes…Home gardening and plant territories are gaining vitality [as a result].”
4. Vista
Too many of the smart gardens on the market today prioritize function over aesthetics, amounting to cold, vertical farms that would look more at home in a research center’s greenhouse than a living room. That’s why designer Juhyuck Han created Vista, a smart garden appliance that mimics a landscape’s natural terrain and scales it down to fit in our homes. Designed to either stand-alone or be mounted on an interior wall, Vista takes up around the same space as a large fish tank. Featuring a hydroponic gardening system, Vista’s grow tray mimics the terrain of a natural landscape to bring users closer to nature. Through an immersive structure and smart technology, Vista combines functionality with aesthetics to create a gardening experience.
5. Elpo
Inspired to provide an air filter for collaborative spaces, designers Kārlis Vītols, Lolita Epnere, Buka Bērziņa ushered Elpo into the office, a smart biofilter that doubles as a teeming, indoor garden. By absorbing airborne toxins and gases into their leaves and sending them down to their roots, some plants are able to help purify the air we breathe. Equipped with a smart biofilter, it’s not only the plants that Elpo uses to improve indoor air quality. Like many modern indoor gardens, Elpo comes stocked with automated, smart technology that lights, fans, and irrigates the potted greenery. In creating a smart biofilter that doubles as an indoor garden, Elpo improves indoor air quality while also functioning as a room divider in office settings.
6. The BloomingTables
Designed to be the world’s first ‘living furniture series’, the patent-pending BloomingTables allow you to grow herbs and vegetables, cultivate microgreens, or enjoy the beauty of succulents and vining plants in the comfort of your home. With homes and apartments growing smaller and balconies becoming more of a luxury, the BloomingTables provide a uniquely aesthetic compromise – giving you a table along with the added benefit of a tiny terrarium for your house plants. The BloomingTables come in 4 sizes – a desk, coffee table, entryway table, and a side table – all featuring a waterproof acrylic trough-shaped base and a flat glass panel on top. Each table is equipped with a drain valve at the bottom (just in case you want to drain out any excess water from your planter’s soil), and the glass panel on top is removable too, allowing you to easily water, prune, and tend to your plants!
7. The Bridge
The Bridge builds on the increasingly popular idea of an open office and a collaborative workspace (as opposed to compartmentalized cabin spaces). It’s entirely made from plywood and can be flat-packed to a location and assembled on spot. It uses wooden joineries instead of metal/glue fixtures, and can be assembled and propped onto any open desk, uplifting your current workspace with a neat touch of greenery. The channels are big enough to hold potted plants and they give you the freedom to add plants of your own choice. Since the plants sit in their own planters (instead of directly in the wooden channel), they can easily be watered too without worrying about wood-rot or exposing the plywood to excess water/moisture. Just be slightly wary against dropping water on the expensive computers/equipment below!
8. The Smart Landscape Growframe
Designed by Modern Sprout, the Smart Landscape Growframe is a minimal frame that can be mounted on any wall on your home, and whose functionality is more complex than its simple looks! It nourishes all kinds of plants – from ones that seek low light, to ones that seek bright light. Once mounted on a wall, you can slide your favorite plants into the Growframe, and connect to the Modern Sprout app. The app is a complete godsend! The app features an on/off switch and can be used for customizable programming and pairing recommendations for partial shade, partial sun, and full sun plants. You can easily select and switch between light settings.
9. WALTY
Designed to take the absolute hassle out of watering and taking care of your plants, WALTY gives them the water they need by simply pulling it out of the atmosphere. Because a singular plant can’t generate and capture enough atmospheric humidity as an entire forest, WALTY basically does that part for your plant. Now it might sound borderline magical, but the way WALTY works is similar to a dehumidifier. A dehumidifier pulls moisture from the air using cold plates that force water droplets to condense on them. The droplets then drip down into a reservoir tank, and when it fills up, you simply empty it out. WALTY’s approach is similar, except it uses that very water to keep your plant hydrated… sort of like a win-win.
10. Vega’s modular planter
Vega’s modular planter was designed to be a solution for vertical farming in small living spaces. Starting with a single modular cube, seeds can be planted and harvested using traditional planting methods, then another module can be positioned on top of the first cube, forming a link for additional planters to be added. Each modular planter comes as a dish with an accompanying cubic case that grants room for the crops and plants to grow and reach their full height. Inspired by the look and durability of Japanese metabolism and Social modernism architecture, Lorenzo Vega conceptualized his vertical farm to be stripped-down and clean by design. The sleek, simple finish of Vega’s modular planter echoes its intuitive usability and modular customization.
