From five seedlings to an office jungle.
I'm a software architect. In March 2026 I started growing food in my office. I started with five plants, added five more, then another five, and ended up with approximately 20 cherry tomato and cucumber plants.
This is how it happened, in three chapters. Every photo and clip is from my own recordings, dated from the original files.
The office jungle · 23 July 2026
The beginning
Back to the start: a few seed trays on the office floor.
Seeds on the office floor
The first footage in the archive: black seed-starting trays on the office floor, with the first green sprouts pushing through.
Seedlings under an LED light
Seedlings in a cell tray under an LED lamp — that's the pink-purple glow in the footage.
Early evening phone footage — soft, but it's the record of how it started.
Potting day
Fabric grow bags, bags of potting substrate and perlite spread across a plastic sheet on the office floor. I filled the bags and moved the seedlings in.
Tomatoes and cucumbers, side by side
The young plants settled into their bags, each with its seed packet stuck in the soil as a label.
The transformation
From bags on the floor to a wall of leaves.
Grow bags by the window
The bags lined up in front of the office's floor-to-ceiling windows.
The plants start taking over
By mid-May the plants were tall enough to start filling the window.
Desk on one side, plants on the other
Laptops, an office chair — and a wall of leaves. This is still a working software office.
The results
Fruit — in an office.
Ripe cherry tomatoes and hanging cucumbers
Red cherry tomato trusses, green fruit still coming, and cucumbers hanging between the leaves — all in the office.
Left to right: a ripe cherry tomato truss, trusses ripening from green to red, a cucumber on the vine.
23 July50 days later
Counting trusses
186 tomato trusses recorded across five plants.
I counted the fruit trusses on five tomato plants, stem by stem, and wrote them down. Those counts are published on the tomato experiment page.
A recorded count of fruit clusters — not a harvest weight.
See the stem-by-stem countsWhy this became GardenCopilot.
Documenting this garden meant writing things down: when seedlings moved, which bag each plant lived in, how many trusses each stem carried. That habit — plan it, grow it, track it, learn from it — is what GardenCopilot is built on.
It starts with what exists today: experiment logs and practical guides from this office, and free tools like the grow-light cost calculator. Over time it will grow into a personal growing assistant for anyone running their own indoor food experiment. That assistant is in development and not available yet.
- Available nowExperiment logs & guidesWhat was grown here, and how — with honest data labels.Read the experiment logs
- Available nowFree planning toolsStarting with the grow-light electricity calculator.Try the calculator
- In developmentA personal growing assistantHelp to plan a setup, grow, track each plant and learn from the results.See the plan for the app
Follow the next chapter.
Get an email when there's a new experiment log, finding or guide — no fixed schedule, no filler.
- Practical growing updates Things you can apply to your own plants.
- New experiment findings With the numbers — clearly marked measured or estimated.
- Product news first When the GardenCopilot app, and any future growing kits, are ready.