The Smart Garden 9 is a self-contained kitchen garden for your “herbs” and vegetables

When we last met Click & Grow they were selling a massive wall garden designed for indoor gardening. Their new product, called the Smart Garden, is a self-contained kit pod for growing fruits, vegetables, and “herbs” that costs $129 on Kickstarter

The system is quite simple. You fill the water tank, place in small pods of soil, nutrients, and seeds and then turn it on. It’s automatically lit by a set of LEDs and all you have to do is raise the lights when the plants get too high. The entry level gets you all lettuce pods but there are also seedless pods so you can grow anything you want.

The kit can grow nine plants and automatically waters your pods as necessary.

Mattias Lepp, founder of Click & Grow, was an orchestra conductor who went into IT. Telia acquired his first IT company in Estonia and he decided to return to his long-term interest in plant cultivation.

“We have over 300,000 active users for our products thus far,” he said. “The main volume of users today is made up by our second generation product users, the Smart Herb Garden, but we’re seeing a lot of traction happening already for the larger wall farms directed at consumers as well.”

“The Smart Garden 9 got it’s start from surveys we made among our clients,” he said. “More than 80% indicated an interest in having a bigger garden than our previous one. The bigger bulk of the 9-hole product specific wishes came from the backers of our last project on Kicsktarter. So we decided to give people what they want and also improved some key features on the new garden: we featured high-end LED lights that offer plants the perfect spectrum to induce photosynthesis while focusing the lenses in a way that there’s much less light pollution coming from the LEDs.”

The company raised $4.1 million from a number of investors including Jaan Tallinn and Ruchi Sanghvi. They’ve also received some government funding to make the smart soil product. The Smart Garden 9 ships next July but I saw an early version and it looks like what Apple would make if it really liked tiny peppers. I approve.