Auto-salad

People buy little packets of salad leaves to use in their food. This means there is always a supply of fresh salad leaves in the kitchen.

Some people spend a lot of time and effort growing fresh salad. This means there is sometimes an overabundance of fresh salad leaves in the garden, and takes a lot of time and effort.

The Auto-salad is a complete all-in-one mechanised unit that fits in a space under the worktop counter bench. It is plumbed to the water supply and the drain, and to the electrical supply.

It uses miniaturised hydroponics systems to grow small trays of salad leaves - enough leaf in one tray for one days typical use. Each trat is mounted on a rotary conveyor. There are enough trays that a complete cycle of seeding, growing, maturing, harvesting, flowering and seeding can be accomodated on a day-by-day basis.

No external user inputs are required. Every day the current tray moves into position at the cutter head, which harvests the leaves and deposits them in a cool receptacle under a hatch at the front, for the user to pull fresh leaves out of at meal-times. A certain percentage of trays are allowed to go to seed, to maintain a supply of fresh seed whcih the machine uses to seed new trays.

A continuous supply of fresh salad is almost guaranteed!