Originally published in The Dirt on Organic Farming magazine, May 2014.

The Foody Tower is a very clever design and a great solution for people who have absolutely no space for growing food. It’s made of a heavy-duty plastic that’s BPA free, which means no concerns about adding toxins to your plants.

The footprint for this stackable planter is just a little over 2 feet, which means it can fit in places where a standard pot would fit, but provide substantially more yield as you stack the parts on top of each other.

Another great feature of the Foody is its portability. If you live in a climate that has cold winters, you can easily move it indoors for the winter, then back outside when it warms up—letting you grow your own produce year round.

The Foody comes in two basic configurations, one for manual watering and the other with an automatic water recycling system. Here at The Dirt, we decided to try the manual system—and discovered there was a wealth of compost tea that accumulates in the base. Our resident engineer came up with a simple extraction method—a turkey baster—that works like a charm and lets us recycle the water both back into the Foody and to other plants in our garden.

The Foody also provides an easy way to grow a variety of vegetables, fruits and herbs. Each planting container has at least eight planter openings, and we’ve put in a variety of plants ranging from chives and carrots to beans.

While the Foody Tower can be used for hydroponic gardening, we found it works really well with soil and compost, just like any other gardening container.

RATING: We love it! We give it five leaves!