How much does it cost to make a Food Forest in your home?

Ouch. There's really no way to make a blanket statement about how much any type of hydroponics is going to cost - it really has to be applied on a case-by-case level. However, there are some ideas that can help you try to pin down how much money you would need to set up one of these gardens in your house.

First of all, let's start with this – what would you consider a “food Forest?”

Garden Size

A lot of people start out with grandiose schemes of having entire room draped with vegetable matter, only to realize that this is much too big for their needs.

To really get an idea of how much green stuff a specifically sized garden produces, you have to first look at plants actually producing food. Then you realize that over the course of a growing season, one plant can give you bushels of fruits or vegetables. That means for most families, only a small garden is necessary, unless you’re doing more, like giving away or selling extra produce.

The Setup

There are also a lot of different ways to set up a garden in the house. You can make a small walled garden or hanging garden in a kitchen, or embed a garden into some types of kitchen appliances. You can set up a vertical or A-frame garden in a basement or other unused interior space. You can even work these designs into furniture. But how much do they cost?

The bottom line is that you can get a relatively full-featured hydroponic grow kit for several hundred dollars. These are the cheapest and most affordable kits, but they come with a lot of what you wanted to start to grow plants. As for standalone equipment, you wouldn't expect to pay more than a couple hundred dollars for each additional element such as lighting, carbon dioxide additions, extra nutrient packages, etc. You might expect to pay another similar amount for materials -- in other words, if you double your total installation costs for extra materials, there's a good chance that you’ll be safe in terms of money. But again, it really depends -- it depends on the space, what you have available, whether you can utilize natural sunlight, how you set up your plant pots, what your irrigation system is like, etc.

In the end, you should be able to set up your home garden for a couple of thousand dollars. Or significantly less! Take a look at what modern retailers offer to figure out what works for your home or business space.