How to Choose Seedlings & How Many You Need for a Tower Garden
Choosing what to grow is one of the most fun parts of starting a Tower Garden — but it can also be one of the most confusing.
← Return to the Seeds & Seedlings Guide
How many lettuce seedlings do you need? Should you fill every opening? How many tomatoes can one Tower handle? And how do you know whether the crops you're choosing make sense for your family, your climate and your growing space?
The answer isn't simply to count the number of growing ports and order that many seedlings.
A better approach is to start with what you actually want to harvest and eat, then build your garden around that.
Jump to a Section
First: How Many Growing Spaces Do You Have?
Knowing how many planting spaces your system has gives you a starting point — but it doesn't tell you how many large plants your Tower can comfortably support.
20 regular growing spaces.
16 regular growing spaces plus 16 spaces designed for baby greens.
Adds 8 regular growing spaces.
Baby Greens extensions add 32 baby-green spaces, while Combo extensions add 4 regular spaces and 16 baby-green spaces.
🌱 Here's the important part: Having 20 growing spaces doesn't mean you should plant 20 large vegetables. Twenty lettuce plants and twenty tomato plants are two very different gardens.
How Many Seedlings Do You Actually Need?
Before you start filling your cart, think about how your household actually eats. The number of plants you need depends on much more than the number of empty spaces in your Tower.
💡 Don't start with “How many plants fit in my Tower?”
Start with “How much of this crop do we actually eat?” Then work backward from there.
How Many Seedlings Should You Start With?
There isn't one perfect number for every household, but these are useful starting points. After one or two growing cycles, you'll have a much better idea of which crops your family goes through quickly and which ones you don't need as many of.
Lettuce: Think About How Much You Eat Each Week
For many households, 6–8 lettuce plants is a good starting point.
But don't think of each lettuce plant as something you have to leave untouched until it becomes one full mature head. You can start harvesting lettuce while it's young, picking baby lettuce and outer leaves while allowing other plants to continue growing toward full-sized heads.
This lets you have lettuce at different stages of growth and creates a much more continuous harvest.
🥬 How much lettuce does your household eat?
If your family eats roughly the equivalent of 6–8 heads of lettuce in a week, starting with 6–8 plants is reasonable and you can adjust from there based on how you prefer to harvest.
If you're feeding a large family, school, restaurant or community and need something like 20 heads per week, that's an entirely different scale. You'll need considerably more growing space and likely multiple Towers to maintain that level of production.
Starting Quantities for Other Crops
Use these as starting points rather than strict rules. Your eating habits should always be the deciding factor.
| Crop | Good Starting Point | What to Consider |
|---|---|---|
| Lettuce | 6–8 plants | Harvest baby lettuce and outer leaves while other plants continue growing. Scale the number to how much lettuce your household eats each week. |
| Kale, Swiss Chard & Other Greens | 1–2 of each variety | You can continually harvest larger outer leaves while allowing the center of the plant to keep growing. |
| Herbs | 1 of each variety | Most households can harvest repeatedly from a healthy herb plant. Add more of the herbs you use heavily. |
| Celery | 1–2 plants | Start small unless celery is something your household uses frequently. |
| Broccoli & Cauliflower | 1 of each to start | These take considerably more room than lettuce or herbs, so think about the harvest relative to the space they occupy. |
| Beans & Peas | 4 or more | A larger group of plants generally gives you a more useful harvest than growing just one bean or pea plant. |
| Cucumbers | 1 plant to start | Cucumbers can become large and productive. Give them room and support rather than filling several adjacent ports. |
| Squash & Zucchini | 1 plant to start | These are large plants and can quickly dominate the surrounding area. |
| Melons | 1 plant to start | Allow room for vines and remember that developing fruit will need support. |
| Eggplant | 1 plant to start | A mature eggplant is a substantial plant. One productive plant may be plenty for many households. |
| Peppers | 1 of each variety | Start with one plant of each pepper you enjoy and add more later if your household uses a lot of them. |
| Tomatoes | 1 of each variety | Tomatoes can become very large. Variety matters enormously, so check whether you're choosing a compact, determinate or large vining tomato. |
| Strawberries | Several plants | Individual plants don't produce huge quantities of fruit at once, so strawberries are one crop where most people prefer having several plants. |
These numbers aren't meant to tell you exactly what your Tower must look like. They're designed to stop you from accidentally planting six zucchini plants when what you really needed was six lettuce plants and one zucchini!
Plant Size Matters More Than the Number of Ports
A Tower filled with lettuce, herbs and leafy greens can use nearly every growing space. A Tower containing tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, eggplant and melons needs much more breathing room.
Fill More Spaces
Lettuce, arugula, spinach, cilantro, parsley, chives, strawberries and many other greens fit comfortably into a densely planted Tower.
Allow More Room
Basil, kale, peppers, beans and similar crops develop larger canopies and may shade nearby plants as they mature.
Use Them Sparingly
Tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, zucchini, melons and other large or vining crops need substantially more room and often require support.
🌿 A useful rule for planting: Think of your Tower like a pyramid. Put your largest plants toward the bottom and your smaller plants toward the top so large crops don't shade everything growing beneath them.
As a general starting point, we recommend keeping the number of very large crops to around six or fewer on one outdoor Tower. You may want considerably fewer depending on the varieties you're growing.
For more information about the mature size and growing habits of individual crops, use our Hydroponic Crop Library →
Are You Growing Indoors or Outdoors?
The same crop can be a great choice outdoors and a difficult choice indoors simply because of its mature size.
☀️ Growing Outdoors
Outdoor Towers generally give larger plants more room to spread. Tomatoes, cucumbers, squash and other fruiting crops can be excellent choices when you have the space and the weather is right.
You'll still need to think about support, mature plant size and whether larger crops will shade smaller ones.
💡 Growing Indoors
Indoors, available space beneath your grow lights becomes much more important. Leafy greens and herbs are easy choices, while compact fruiting varieties are usually easier to manage than large vining plants.
Don't Forget About Pollination
If you're choosing fruiting crops, remember that producing flowers isn't the same as producing fruit.
Tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, squash, melons and other fruiting plants may need help with pollination — especially indoors where bees and other pollinators aren't available.
If you don't want to deal with pollination, leafy greens and herbs are much simpler choices.
Choose Crops for Your Current Growing Conditions
Just because a plant grows well in a Tower Garden doesn't mean it's the right crop for your Tower right now.
Lettuce may thrive during cool weather while struggling through intense summer heat. Tomatoes and peppers may love warm days but stop performing when temperatures move outside their preferred range.
Your location matters too. A grower in Florida may be planting cool-season crops at the same time someone farther north is moving their garden indoors for winter.
🥬 What Can I Grow?
Compare crops by temperature, difficulty, pollination requirements, support needs and growing habits.
🌦️ What Should I Grow Right Now?
Use your season and actual growing conditions to decide which crops make sense now.
Think About When You'll Harvest
Choosing seedlings isn't only about what you want to eat. Think about when you want to eat it.
Different crops mature at different speeds, and different harvesting styles can help spread your harvest over time.
Lettuce is a great example. You can harvest some leaves as baby lettuce, continually remove outer leaves from other plants, and allow some plants to develop into mature heads.
Other crops work differently. Herbs can often be clipped repeatedly. Tomatoes and peppers can produce over a long period. Broccoli and cauliflower give you a much more concentrated main harvest.
🌱 You don't need everything to be ready at the same time.
A good Tower Garden often contains crops at different stages of growth. As plants are harvested or reach the end of their productive life, replace them with new seedlings and keep the garden moving.
Planning Your First Tower Garden
One of the easiest mistakes to make with your first Tower is trying to grow a little bit of absolutely everything.
You don't need to.
Start with crops your household genuinely enjoys eating. Include plenty of forgiving leafy greens and herbs, then add a few larger or fruiting crops you're excited to grow.
🌱 Your first planting doesn't have to be perfect.
Your Tower will teach you a lot. You'll quickly discover which crops your family eats faster than you expected, which ones produce more than you need, and which plants you simply enjoy growing.
Use that experience to adjust your next planting.
And remember: you don't have to fill every growing space on day one. Leaving a few openings while larger plants establish can be much better than overcrowding the Tower simply because there was an empty port.
Ready to Choose Your Seedlings?
Browse our live seedlings and choose crops that fit your growing space, your conditions and — most importantly — what you actually want to eat.
Shop Tower Garden Seedlings →Continue Learning
Once you've decided what to grow, these guides will help you with the next steps.
🌱 Seeds & Seedlings
Learn about choosing crops, starting seeds, growing seedlings and getting young plants ready for your system.
Seeds & Seedlings Guide →🥬 Crop Library
Compare individual crops and find detailed growing guides for vegetables, herbs, greens and fruiting plants.
Explore the Crop Library →🌦️ Seasonal Growing
Learn how crop choices change through spring, summer, fall and winter.
Seasonal Growing Guide →💡 Light
Understand how much light plants need indoors and outdoors and how to position indoor grow lights.
Tower Garden Light Guide →🌿 Nutrients
Learn how much Mineral Blend to use and how nutrient needs change as plants grow.
Tower Garden Nutrients Guide →💧 Water
Learn about water quality, chlorine, chloramine and keeping your Tower Garden reservoir healthy.
Tower Garden Water Guide →
