The “growing revolution” is on as Grove’s new Ecosystems come online at Greentown Labs’ incubator space in Union Square.

By Haley ED Houseman

There’s a small Eden being built in the Greentown Labs incubator space off Union Square. The space is getting greener, as the largest company within, Grove, reached a major milestone with over $200,000 raised via Kickstarter, more than twice the company’s goal.

Grove held a launch party for their newest line of products on November 4, kicking off a national tour to showcase the new and improved line of Ecosystems. The model has moved beyond early adopter systems and prototypes to full-fledged, flexible biospheres for plug and play urban gardening.

After going through a startup accelerator, they began to grow at Greentown Labs in Somerville, a green technology incubator around Union Square. They now vie for the title of the site’s largest unit, with more than 20 people as a part of a complex team of biologists, ecologists, software engineers and designers.

In 2014, Grove raised over $2 million in seed funding to get the company properly underway. The startup was launched in a fraternity house by two MIT students, Jamie Byron and Gabe Blanchet. In the months after creating the first prototype, a veritable jungle had sprung forth from their room: beans, lettuce, kiwis, and some dozen other plants filled the window, fertilized by filtrate from a fish tank below.

As it grew, other fraternity brothers would wander in to drink their beers garden-side, munching on greenery and watching the fish. This small pocket of biodiversity had birthed a community. Wandering the space in Greentown Labs, you can see this ethos still at play, with Byron nibbling on bits of herbs and greens as he gives a tour, sampling the growing crops and greeting the various members of the development team in the lab space that houses the experiments.

There are a lot of offers to try this or that plant in the lab, encouraging visitors to taste, touch and smell the product. It also speaks to the desire of Grove’s team to educate, not just provide a self-sufficient product.

The Grove’s newest ecosystem is a bookshelf-sized unit that includes specialized, customizable grow lights, seedling trays and the endlessly fascinating animal element. It also comes with an app that monitors, tracks and assesses the system, so even beginners have step-by-step help in keeping their ecosystem healthy. There are features like a vacation mode for leaving the system attended, and a photographic diagnostic function that gives feedback based on the snapshot of a leaf.

It is these features that make the Grove products accessible to even the novice urban gardener, along with an app that integrates a tracking system, growers’ community, a digital gardening almanac, and a supply marketplace. There is even a growing team on call to reach out to when the technology isn’t enough. The whole system costs about $35 to run over the course of a month, with all settings customizable to trade off production for energy use.

The components work together to create a closed ecosystem, eliminating to a great extent both pests and weeds. The system feeds water through the fish tank stocked with filter feeder and fish, which fertilizer the plant growing medium and create a community of microbes that keep the plants healthy. The plants grow under the specialty grow lights in a soil-less hydroponic medium and aquaponic fish (snails or shrimp) feed the system, cultivating the microbes that feed the plants.

The system is self-cleaning and self-contained, so you can focus on the growing aspect. The set up is best for starting seedlings and specializes in herbs and greens, as well as a selection of fruiting vegetables such as peppers, beans and tomatoes.

If you are considering the indoor gardening system, you are not alone. There will be an early adopter system in a local Somerville classroom within the next month. Mayor Curtatone has expressed interest in the newest line of ecosystems, as well as a few local schools and residents. Former Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley was an early adopter of the original prototype systems.

You can look into purchasing the systems at a sharp discount via their Kickstarter campaign, or wait until the systems become available at retail once the campaign closes.