I’d like to address a few points that were brought to my attention after my recent article on Tim Blank and the Tower Garden ™. 
I, like many other distributors and National Marketing Directors at NSA, am incredibly excited about the opportunities the Tower Garden ™ will create for people who are interested in growing their own food, or in learning more about where their food comes from. Part of that excitement led me to make a few statements that may have been misunderstood, so I’d like to discuss those now.
First, we said that the Tower Garden™ allows “year round” growing, and I want to make sure that I’m very clear about what that means. As a grower of produce, you will always be limited by the climate that you live in. If you currently can grow food year round where you live, the Tower Garden ™ will make that easier and produce healthier plants. The Tower Garden ™ will allow the rest of us to extend our growing season. As it is portable and space-thrifty, it can be moved into an inexpensive pop-up greenhouse, or with indoor, full-spectrum lighting, right into your living room. So there are ways to modify and extend the growing season to almost-if-not-full-year round.
Second, in the article I discussed that Tower Garden ™ growing is “pesticide free.” That has been true for the seven Tower Gardens™ that my family is currently using to grow our produce, but not everyone will choose to be pesticide free. Some plants may still be eaten by insects, so each gardener will have to make the choice for themselves. I will say that, for us, there have been few-to-no issues with insects because the produce grown in our Tower Gardens ™ isn’t planted in the ground, which is where so many insects attack crops. We plan to continue to grow our produce without pesticides, just as we plan to continue to buy fruit and vegetables from organic growers who do not use pesticides on their crops.
Third, the Tower Garden ™ is described as plug-and-play, and by that we mean that it is easy to set up, and anyone can learn to grow produce in it. It’s far less complicated than traditional hydroponic systems, but this is not to say that it’s 100% hassle free (as that would be a preposterous promise to make): the Tower Garden ™, and the food you grow in it, will need love and attention, and this can be a pleasure instead of a burden as the process is easier than traditional gardening and inviting to novices. If you do have to leave town, you will need to make sure that your Tower Garden ™ is attended to (with regard to water levels, pH, and mineral content). There are easy, step-by-step instructions that any neighbor can follow. The reward for your neighbor for helping out would be the ample food produced by the Tower. And watch out: if they help you grow food, they will want one of their own. Overall, I do think that the Tower Garden ™ needs a lot less babysitting than traditional gardens do, as we neglected ours for weeks at one point and it was still producing food (with no weeds!).
But in all honestly, I truly love our Tower Gardens™. My husband and I are producing more food than we can possibly consume by ourselves, with less work than we would put into a typical ground-garden or hydroponic growing system. The food is nutrient dense and delicious, and we couldn’t be more excited about growing our own produce.