What most people miss in urban settlements is the connection with nature and the inability to indulge in gardening. While most people living in urban regions have settled for balcony gardens and smart indoor garden setups, they do take up valuable floor space. Be that as it may, modern problems need modern solutions. Industrial design company Adaption led by Deokhee Jeong has designed Balcony Farm indoor garden which presents a smart way of growing plants at home while fostering a healthy urban farming community. But how does it differ from a standard smart indoor garden? Well, this particular farm installs on window ledges and saves you precious square footage.
The innovative plant-growing method offered by Balcony Farm is sustainable and a new-age concept inspired by vertical farming. It can be installed into windows, requiring no additional space. The seedlings are grown using waste heat produced by steel manufacturing processes. Post cultivation, the seedlings are delivered via community hubs and can be grown in homes. The design of Balcony Farm indoor garden suffices to provide natural light and ventilation – which it gets in abundance thanks to its window-mounting – to the plants which can range from leafy greens to herbs and flowers to fruits.
This indoor planting system provides a stable and healthy environment for the greens using a capillary seedbed structure resembling the natural soil environment. A nutrient solution is provided to plants depending on their growth stage using capillary action. Balcony Farm creates an ideal cultivation environment for the plants by incorporating a rapid exhaust system that enables leaf transpiration thus supplying water from top to bottom just like rainwater.
Furthermore, a natural ventilation device helps keep the air clean. There is even a heat exchanger attached to the frame of this indoor garden that helps maintain the optimum temperature of inflowing air. Apart from clean air, the Balcony Farm makes use of an artificial light system that boosts plant growth in addition to sunlight that it receives naturally on the window.
All the data related to the growth environment such as sunlight, water, temperature, and wind is automatically recorded and saved on a cloud network. This data can be accessed by the plant growers using a mobile app and they can share it with others in the Balcony Farm community. This encourages people to share unique farming tips and their results with one another. In this way, when you use this indoor garden you feel connected to a like-minded group of gardening enthusiasts.
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The app developed by Adaption allows easy registration without any complicated installation process. You can add a plant to Balcony Farm indoor garden app by simply scanning the QR code on the side of the plant cartridge. The users can then see real-time data relating to the cultivation environment. They can also keep a personal diary of every pet plant as it grows. On a larger scale, it makes users a part of a “green community.”
The product line-up of the Balcony Farm indoor garden has three variants – Duo, Solo and Pot. The Duo has two levels and can fit up to 32 plants. It is perfect for cultivating flowering plants, leafy vegetables, and fruits. Balcony Farm Solo is a single-level garden while the Pot version is a standalone version that can be installed anywhere in the home as it is equipped with artificial lighting and irrigation system.
All the variants use the same mobile application to let growers track the well-being of their plants. This unique product design concept for urban agriculture and green living will be showcased at IFA 2024, held from September 6-10 in Berlin, Germany.
