You walk into CES and you’ll probably see more chips, gadgets, microprocessors, and tech you’ve ever seen in your life. Amidst this forest of plastic, metal, and silicone, I managed to spot a bit of greenery and obviously I stopped dead in my tracks. You see, I’m a bit of a gardener myself, having grown tomatoes, lemons, basil, mint, sunflowers, bell peppers, and now even peas and chillis. I recently invested in a hydroponic tower, that grows plants without soil, instead using only water. The obvious benefit of a hydroponic tower is that it’s compact, efficient, fast, and resists plant infections because bugs only thrive in soil.
On the floor at CES I saw the Gardyn, a ‘hybridponic’ tower that also adds AI to the mix, giving you a plant tower that’s smart enough to grow itself rather than involving you with the nitty-gritty details. Powered by two cameras that point directly at the plants while they grow, the Gardyn automatically adjusts lighting and water distribution to its plants, leveraging the power of artificial intelligence to essentially ‘hack’ nature into growing at its fastest pace. What you’re then left with is a kitchen garden that consistently provides you with fresh produce, while you essentially do the bare minimum.
Designer: Gardyn
The Gardyn is almost like your standard hydroponic tower. It comes with a water reservoir at the bottom, and a vertical channel that houses the plants. Water travels from the bottom to the top, raining down on the pods which contain the seeds. Eventually, once the plant grows, the roots get watered occasionally, and nutrients in the water help the plant grow without any soil. The Gardyn comes with sunlight-mimicking light towers too, which switch on or off automatically in line with the circadian rhythm. A camera on the light rod monitors the plants 24*7, getting a sense of how the plants are doing while informing the AI of the plants’ needs and their progress.
Kelby, the Gardyn’s AI assistant, watches over your plants with more dedication than most babysitters. Through a built-in camera and sensors, Kelby knows exactly when to water, how to distribute nutrients, and even which plants are thriving or struggling. My favorite detail? It compiles a time-lapse of your plants growing, which feels like a small nod to the magic of nature even as technology orchestrates the whole thing.
Here’s where things truly get interesting. The Gardyn’s ‘hybridponic’ tower uses machine learning to develop faster ways to grow better plants, but it doesn’t do so in an isolated manner. It works alongside thousands of other Gardyn devices, operating like a hive mind where each machine shares information to help all the Gardyn devices perform better. If a certain watering schedule benefits Kale more, the camera will record the evidence and that Gardyn will ‘teach’ other Gardyns to water kale in the most hyper-optimized way.
What you essentially have to do is just add these readymade pods into your Gardyn. Gardyn provides pre-seeded pods called yCubes, which eliminate the fiddly, messy step of sprouting seedlings elsewhere. If you’ve ever wrestled with rock wool and seed trays, this feels like skipping to dessert without eating your vegetables. Just plug the pods into the Gardyn, fill the water tank, and let the system do its thing. A unique code allows the Gardyn to know which seeds are inside the pod, so the tower essentially has a record of what plants you’re growing. The machine circulates water at just the right intervals, using 95% less than traditional gardening. Yes, you still have to refill the tank now and then, but that’s about as demanding as it gets.
The yCubes come in multiple packs, and you can simply install them into the Gardyn when you want to grow a new plant. Some plants (like spinach for example) have a finite life, which means they either die or become unsuitable for consumption. When your plant reaches that stage, all you do is pull the old yCube out and add a new one. The Gardyn identifies that a new pod has been added to the tower and optimizes light and watering to the tower accordingly.
The beauty of this device lies in two things – firstly, seeing an AI basically turn into an expert horticulturist and farmer, growing your own kitchen garden for you, and secondly, having access to an app that doesn’t just give you all the info you need, but also lets you view a time-lapse of your garden, seeing plants grow from saplings to proper flora in a 10-second clip that’s perfect for the ‘gram.
Gardyn’s team also really emphasized how having and AI basically grow your produce for you really helps you understand how good vegetables can taste. Apparently, the apple you eat today was probably harvested months ago and stored in a deep freezer so it could be transported across the globe. Unless you buy food from a farmer’s market, the food you’re buying is easily weeks or months old, and are made to artificially ripen using certain chemicals. When you grow your food AT HOME, you’re getting the freshest produce ever, and that can have a remarkable effect not just on cost, but also on taste. Lettuce tastes better, tomatoes are sweeter, jalapenos tangier, etc.
And all this can basically exist in a tiny area, giving you an entire farm in the floor-space of essentially a doormat. The Gardyn is compact and vertical, taking up just two square feet of floor space, but it can grow up to 30 plants—plenty for herbs, greens, or even bigger crops like tomatoes and eggplants. For smaller households or limited spaces, there’s a version with fewer slots. Either way, you’re growing a jungle in a corner. A jungle that’s self-growing, self-sustaining, and human-nourishing!
The post This AI-powered Planter Automatically Grows Up To 30 Plants Without Any Soil: Hands-on at CES 2025 first appeared on Yanko Design.