"One of my missions in life is to be as self-reliant as possible. I recently talked about a countertop hydroponic garden that has been giving us fresh produce as well as talked about some other ways to grow food indoors. I think growing indoors is wildly underutilized. Of course, growing outdoors is ideal for most vegetables and it’s cost-effective but you can grow produce with very little expense and even less time involved," writes Morgan Rogue at Outdoor Hub.
Morgan has always wanted a tower garden. When she started looking at options to purchase a Tower Garden, she was blown away by the prices. Though they offered monthly payments of $50-60, it would be for 12-24 months. So they were adding up to $700-1000.
"We recently acquired a 3D printer and my husband said, Why don’t we print one? The first thing we did was find a 3D project to download and print. There are many places to find 3D projects that other people have made. You can find them for free or purchase them, depending on what the project is and where the creator has chosen to upload it."
Next, they purchased food-grade filament. It’s important to purchase food-grade filament as you’ll be growing food in this tower so you don’t want it to. Here’s what we didn’t 3D print: The tubing for the water, The pump, A 5-gallon bucket & lid, A few screws to screw the tower to the 5-gallon bucket, Grow lights and Seed starting pods. All the rest, they did 3D print, even the baskets that hold the plants.
The total cost of the printed parts was $173. Read the entire article at Outdoor Hub