There’s no shortage of new approaches to tech-powered home gardening nowadays, but HAMAMA’s Seed Quilts might be the easiest I’ve seen.
I had a chance to talk to HAMAMA CEO Daniel Goodman at the FOOD IT event put on by the Mixing Bowl this past week, who walked me through how the Seed Quilt works.
I’ll be testing out some Seed Quilts myself shortly and have a formal review later (stay tuned), but the initial impression is that Seed Quilts seems remarkably approachable in an almost smart-garden-meets-Chia-Pet kind of way.
When you sign up for a Seed Quilt subscription, you get a Grow Kit to start and three Seed Quilts. You simply put the Seed Quilt in the Microgrow Kit and water it, and in 7 days you should have some greens on their way.
According to Goodman, the Seed Quilts work with ambient light and don’t need any special lighting.
The idea of the Seed Quilt came to Goodman and his partner Camille Richman after they left MIT Media Lab where they had worked on controlled environment agriculture research. While at MIT, the two were excited about the possibilities of combining automation and agriculture but realized much of the fruits (or greens) of their labor would take some time to commercialize given the complexity of the technology. They wanted to make something more consumer accessible, and the Seed Quilt concept was born.
A subscription to Seed Quilts $14 a month all in, which gets you three Seed Quilts per month. You’ll have to buy the Grow Kit to start, which also costs $14 ($12 plus $2 shipping and handling).
You can see Dan talk about the Seed Quilt in the video above.