So Lucky was having some stool problems. His pathetic little grunts would wake me up at 3:00 in the morning, and I felt so bad for him as he struggled to do his business. He's only two years old. There has to be a solution for this. I decided to grow wheat grass to see if it would help with his problem. Now, I have a brown thumb. When I try to kill a plant, it grows. When I try to grow a plant, it dies. I decided that I needed a kit to get started, so I ordered this. First strike against it....no instruction manual. Hmm. Now, I did order a three-pack of growing kits, so I'm not completely stupid. I figured that I should combine one of each of the packets from the growing kit. So far so good. I put them into the little planter, which I hope I've assembled correctly. I should have been good to go, right? A few days go by, and nothing happens. Hmm. These are plants. Perhaps they need water? That seemed to do the trick. Now, I purchased this for my cats. I specifically purchased it for Lucky, but I figured both cats would make liberal use of it. It turns out, only one cat is getting any use out of it at all, and it's the wrong cat. You see, Azrael has made it her personal mission in life to stand guard over this thing to make sure that none of the grass seeds ever poke out of the green screen. I'm not even remotely kidding. It has been about a week, now, and I rarely see her move from standing over top of this. When a sprout does threaten to reach the screen, she finds a way to pull it out. She'll then eat the green stalk and leave the rest behind. That's when Lucky enters the picture because he loves batting the remaining roots and seed around. He even went so far as to leave one on my pillow yesterday, and I'm pretty sure that the noise I made when I first saw it could be classified as a scream. On the one hand, Azrael's insistence on making sure that the little blades of grass don't go *is* keeping her from eating all of my shoe laces, and that's a huge bonus. A single pair of shoe laces costs about the same as this planter, and she goes through two pairs a week. Essentially, this is a good investment if you take that into consideration alone. However, if I want this to see any benefits on Lucky's digestive health, there is a good chance that I'll need to buy another. UPDATE: If you are going to buy this, do not, I repeat, do not buy the seed kits that the company also offers. One afternoon, I came home from work with a weird smelling house. It wasn't strong, but it was definitely unpleasant. It smelled like someone had some really bad halitosis. I checked my kitties, and their breath was not compromised. So I waited it out. I woke up the next morning to find that the smell had become unbearable, and I had no idea where it was coming from. I tore apart my kitchen looking for it to no avail. It was only later in the day, when I checked the water level on the planter, that I realized that the smell was the growing medium that they include with the seed kits. The stench was horrible. I cannot over emphasize that enough. It is one of the worst smelling things I have ever had the misfortune of experiencing. I almost threw the entire thing away because I didn't want to deal with cleaning it. Instead, I brought it outside and sprayed it off with a hose using a liberal quantity of my car soap. That smell was stuck in my nose for the rest of the day, and my hands still had that smell even after I washed them. I'm leaving a four-star review for the planter because it does what it is supposed to do. I will not leave such a pleasant review for the seed packs. UPDATE: I have a couple of additional comments here that might make the experience of owning this planter more pleasant to would be buyers. First and foremost, you do not need a whole packet of seeds. In my second attempt at growing, I used Mircacle Grow soil that you can usually find at Ace, Home Depot, or even Costco. I used a half of a packet of seeds, and they still came in extremely thick. For my next round, I'm going to try a quarter packet to see how it goes. The grass really took off. On Saturday, I noticed a few shoots peeking through the grate. On Sunday, I noticed that Azrael had apparently gotten bored with attacking the shoots, because about a dozen of them had grown past the grate into bona fide blades of grass. On Monday, I had a large tuft of grass about four inches high, and by Tuesday, they had grown so large that they couldn't support their own weight anymore. A week has passed since then, and they are still very healthy looking. Except for the fact that they won't stand up. A deeper planter might resolve that issue, but my goal here isn't necessarily to have something that is aesthetically pleasing. My goal is to provide my cats with a little bit of grass to munch on to help with their digestive health. So far, I don't see my cats eating the plant anymore. However, I know they are because they are leaving blades of grass all over the house. I'd say that this is a win overall. There are just a couple of minor gripes, but I'm satisfied with my purchase.
