 Hi there and welcome to Little Garden on the Prairies. So we are now entering into the indoor gardening season here on the Saskatchewan Prairies and in today's video I'm going to be showing you how I'm going to get my good old arrow garden going here and also my first time trying the I-Do indoor growing kit. So as you can see here my arrow garden looks like it's been around for a while and I probably have had this for I think about four years now and I love my arrow garden and it has been great for growing herbs and tomatoes and a couple other things that I've tried over the last few years. I don't even know what the the make of this is it doesn't specify I know nowadays that you can get the arrow garden bounty or the harvest and there's a few other models. This one is one of the originals I think. So I would love to have more arrow gardens but they are quite pricey and when I seen the I-Do on Amazon here it was I think on sale for $105. I got it shipped for free through Amazon Prime. I think it was about $120 with taxes. So you know I've seen that this has fairly good reviews. It's somewhere you know on the top five as far as these these type of hydroponic kits and I thought it would be good just to try it out and see how it compares to my good old arrow garden. I skipped the whole unboxing of the I-Do. There's plenty of videos out there but this one is the I-Do 10 pod. So with my arrow garden of course I got a lot of this stuff when I first purchased it. I think it also came with some seeds. I think I got some herbs with it and of course after one year you run out of these pods and these little plastic things sometimes get a little warped and broken. But I have found that I can reuse a lot of that stuff still. I still have my original holders here. I've had to do some cutting to get the the roots out of them but they still work. I always take my arrow garden at the end of the growing season and wash it out really good and with vinegar and water and I can reuse these. And to start my seeds instead of these little pods that you can order online I just been using my Rockwell which I use for a lot of my hydroponics and cracky hydroponic growing. So that works well. I have a big sheet of these that was very inexpensive and I can just put it in to here put my seed in there. I have plenty of these little domes now that I can reuse each year and just set it up that way. So this has worked good for me year after year on the arrow garden. So that's kind of a comparison of what you're getting with the I-Do compared to what I did get with my arrow garden and how I still work with it now without having to to buy replacement pieces to keep on growing in here. It's one difference I see here with my old arrow garden compared to the I-Do is the height of the light. This one this is how high the arrow garden goes and this one here goes probably about three or four inches higher. So that's nice height to have if you want to grow some bigger plants like tomatoes or peppers. So today I am going to be planting some tomatoes in each of these. I'm going to plant the same ones in each one just so we can kind of do some comparison over the season. I have two dwarf tomato varieties that I have grown in my little arrow garden here. I usually just put in two plants and you know it takes up quite a bit of the space. You can't really use you can't really plant any more than two I find and because we have a lot of extra holes here that I'd like to try out I think maybe we'll also maybe stick some herbs in and see if all these can grow together in these two hydroponic setups. So next I'm just going to get the nutrient water ready in each of these and then we can start planting our seeds. Okay so I'm just getting my pods ready and the holders here I'll show you the difference so this is the one that came with the I do and as you can see the pod is a lot longer so it will reach further down into the water. So that's one thing with these pieces of rock well they aren't quite as long. I do kind of try to shove them down as far as I can and if they don't reach that water initially I just keep them wet by spritzing them from the top until they start germinating and shooting out roots but they they don't take long before those roots will reach that nutrient water. Okay so I have my two hydroponic systems set up here in a spot that is underneath a big window here. This is an east-facing window doesn't get a whole lot of light because our deck is kind of covering it but I thought it'd be nice to have a little extra sunlight coming in on these once they get growing. So first of all I'll show you what I planted up here so in the I do I have got the two tomatoes the yellow cherry the tiny Tim these signs are kind of handy at the start when you want to make sure you remember what you planted. So back here I got some chives oregano and I really wanted to get some more chamomile and mint going because I didn't get enough harvested this summer to for my tea to get through the winter so I'm going to try them in the corner here and I thought I might as well put something in the front so I threw in some arugula. So there are three holes that I did not use and this here is just a cover for this is where you add the water. So with my arrow garden we got the yellow cherry the tiny Tim and then I also thought I could use some more basil so I put some in and some thyme and this is where the water gets added as you can see it's getting pretty crusty because those nutrients are pretty salty so they kind of been eating away slowly at my arrow garden here. So we're just going to get these set up now the arrow garden is pretty easy to get going and this is going to be veggies 16 hours of light that's good and that is it for setting up the good old arrow garden. Now I read the instructions on setting up this one I'm not sure if it's going to be quite as simple because there's no clock to set on it so it's automatically going to do a 16 hour on 8 hour off so I might have to to work on that to figure out how to adjust that so the lights are off at night and on during the day. So you can hear my pump running here in the arrow garden pumping some air into the water and also I can see inside that I do that it is also pumping it's quite a bit quieter. So I have the lights adjusted as close as they can get to the seedlings now for germination so hopefully I will be sharing with you a series of videos updating you on how everything is doing in my arrow garden versus the new I do hydroponic system.