Growing Wasabi in an AeroGarden

Each year about this time my husband and I sit down and order seeds for our garden. Me as a culinarian wanting to grow as much of our food as possible. My poor husband trying to keep me in line with how small our garden is at the place we rent now. this year we were both pleasantly surprised when our favorite place to order plants, Gurneys was offering Wasabi. You see one of the first dates we when on was to sushi. In the midwest back then sushi was not a thing many people liked or would even try. We had both been exposed to it in the past and loved it! So to find someone that would go to sushi with you was pretty cool. Our love of sushi continued through me going through culinary school. I learned how to make real sushi from a guest chef that came each year from the best known hibachi place in town to teach sushi to our program. I of-course have done tuns of research, and I even gave one of my speeches in my communications class on sushi. All this to say we found out that getting real wasabi in the USA was harder then silk in the middle ages! Now time ofter documentary we kept hearing how bad american wasabi is and how the real thing is hot not burning with a floral after taste. You see the stuff we have here is just green food-coloring and horseradish, a relative of wasabi... Much like President Obama and Dick Cheney are relatives.... I digress. We ordered two little wasabi plants. Me with only the knowledge that wasabi is notoriously impossible to grow and that a few years earlier an east coast chef smuggled some wasabi tubers to the states hidden in his babies diaper, before then wasabi was unheard of here. Well it seems like the east coast is a good start for wasabi as it need shade, controlled temperatures, organic heavy soil with good drainage or a creek side with some flooding but not so much as to rot the delicate roots. Mist and fog are a plus just don't look at it the wrong way or it might die.... okay the last part was an exaggeration but when you read in to it its not too far off, and look in to it I did. this was one of the more complete guides on growing wasabi, it will give you the basics.

How were we going to accomplish all this in the Midwest? With our 100+ degree temperatures in summer, floods in spring and good foot of snow in the winter. Well we thought back to an old Christmas gift the AeroGarden. It was great for our basement that had no windows and for me in the long dark weeks of winter! Like most other people with the basic herb garden the basal took over and was the shining green emerald in my basement. So after more research and finding that they now have bowls for growing other plants(that don't fit our original model) We decided on the MIRACLE-GRO AEROGARDEN BOUNTY ELITE and the AEROGARDEN GROW BOWL AND STRAWBERRY KIT FOR BOUNTY ELITE GARDENS So far so good. The plants came looking much hardyer then I would have expected. The AeroGarden was super easy to set up and adjust(I just put the strawberries in our garden outside). With the grow bowl it always showed needing water so I called and they said to remove the little bobber and now it's happy. I keep adjusting the settings based on how the plants react and the more I learn about wasabi. They are putting on some stress growth but not too bad. The happy balance we have found so far with the AeroGarden setting is a 2 minute water pump every 58 minutes, with the light a foot above the plants, on for 10 hours from 7am - 5pm. Now this is a lot of light! Wasabi is a shade loving plant you read this over and over but ours was still reaching for the window with anything less. Our solution was to use the same privacy window film that was already on the window that the plants were growing towards, in my mind the plants were approving the film not taking to much UV from them. We took some of the film and folded it over and stuck it to it's self (very hard to do with out a tun of bubbles, but the spray it comes with really helped). I cut it to shape and we placed it over the grow guide rail that came with the AeroGarden. Now that we have the ?shade/ light-defuser? on, the plants are super happy and growing well. I'll post more later as we they mature seeing as it takes 2 years to develop a tuber. 17-5-16

Up date photos

End of May

June

PS The poor plants got shocked when we were away and our house sitter forgot to water them. They are still very much alive and Huge but I'm going to wait till they are looking a bit better to post the photos.

After the not getting enough water and a major cutting bock of most the damaged leafs.

It put out a lot of these taller shoots and stress flowered.

Still recovering but now so big it goes though about a salon of water in two weeks. so we added a extra tank. Dec 16

not quite back to size but getting there! Jan 17

May 2017 update: The Wasabi is still growing strong the biggest challenge is keeping enough water in it. We go through this bad cycle of adding water then a couple of weeks later the whole plant goes all floppy and it needs more! Then the wasabi stress grows (using more water then it would normally need) with lots of flowers and tuns of new growth, then I have to clean up the dead leafs(about half as much as shown on the plant went into the trash before this photo). Then we add the monthly nutrients and repeat. So basically this is a pet more then a house plant, but one that I'm pretty proud of. Three notes this far in 1, we are going through almost a gallon of water a week, and with the AeroGarden you have to use distilled water, so the cost of a pet wasabi is something to consider. 2, you have to clean up the dead leafs every month or so anyhow because any extra cover shades the growth medium and promotes mold, so if you see to much shade or dead plant matter get it out of there! 3, Flavor: The leafs (witch are edible) are pretty gross, if you try the young leafs the sappy bitter flavor isn't as bad, but they are Not going on anyones salad! However, you do get that floral, spicy but not burn kind of tingle note at the end of all the leafs, so I'm pretty excited for the rhizome... witch I have no plans of harvesting any time soon... again this became a pet at some point...