Auk Mini 2 Indoor Smart Garden Review: Better Where It Counts

Attractive design, now with more color options. Extremely easy to set up and maintain. Can grow whatever you want. New, less intrusive light with an optional app and vacation mode. Tomato-and-pepper kit with longer dowels available as an add-on.

Lack of pump means potentially stagnant water (but also one less failure point).

When Auk’s original Mini 1 herb garden hit the market in 2024, it touched on something that many tabletop gardens had until that point failed to consider: If you’re going to give up that much counter or table space, you don’t want it to be for something ugly.

Aerogardens and similar models look … fine, but you’re probably not going to see one in the background of an Architectural Digest shoot. The Auk Mini filled that marketplace gap with its pairing of sleek Scandinavian design and utility, transforming the run-of-the-mill herb-growing operation into a conversation piece.

When I reviewed the original Auk Mini last fall, I loved that it allowed users to plant their own seeds in widely available coco coir, an alternative to peat moss made from coconut husks. No proprietary pods, no subscriptions, no fussy app.

When I started testing the brand-new Auk 2 earlier this summer, I wondered what new features could possibly justify a new model. Turns out, there was more room for improvement than I thought.

Same but Different

For the uninitiated, Auk (pronounced “owk”) is a Norwegian company that released its first garden, the Auk 1, in 2021. Essentially a larger version of the Mini 1, the Auk 1 received mixed reviews online for its tower water reservoir and inconsistent light and watering cycles. (In fact, a former WIRED director tested it and became so frustrated that he threw it in the trash.)

The Mini 1 was a simplified version of the Auk system, with four oval pots set over a 3-liter reservoir. Users could grow the included herb seeds or anything else they wanted in the pots using coco coir. It was simple, stylish, and effective.

The Auk Mini 2 features a handful of updates, but perhaps the most visible is that it comes in new color variations, rather than just black and white. There are still the oak and walnut wood bottoms, but Mini 2 offers beech and ash instead of the Mini 1’s cork. Espresso, sage, and terra-cotta colored tops now join the menu of offerings.

The Mini 2 also sports bigger plant pots and a 25 percent larger water capacity, despite its overall footprint being 12 percent smaller than the original.

There is now also—and I admittedly had mixed feelings about this—an app. Using the Auk Connect app isn’t mandatory; you can still control the light schedule manually using a button on the light bar, as with the Auk Mini 1. The app doesn’t add much, but to its credit, it’s easy to set up. You don’t even need to make an account. Just download it; open it; and choose your garden, which the app should already recognize. You’ll access a page where you can turn the light on or off, dim it, set a time schedule, or swap grow mode from “Herbs & Salads” to “Fruits & Veggies.”

Though the stock dowels for the light bar on the Mini 2 are, as on the Mini 1, too low at a maximum of 15 inches to easily accommodate taller fruiting plants like peppers, Auk now offers a $39 Chili & Tomato Kit with longer dowels and a tray with larger pots (two instead of three). I have not tried it, but I’d be surprised if it didn’t result in substantially increased success rates.

The app also allows you to select the Mini 2’s brand-new vacation mode feature, which it calls Slow Mode. On Slow Mode, the Mini 2’s lights dim to slow down growth and water absorption so that, if you need to step away, you’re not left with a mess of overgrown parsley and bolting basil, as happened when I tested the Mini 1.

Let There Be (Better) Light

For comparison purposes, I grew the same herbs in the Mini 2 as I did in the Mini 1: Italian parsley and Genovese basil. I also used only the included nutrients. However, once the parsley and basil got to harvestable size, I noticed something different: These herbs were not leggy. In fact, they were lush and bushy, just like the marketing photos, with almost none of the floppiness that plagued my plants when I tested the earlier model.

This result was, I learned, due in part to the Mini 2’s new light bar incorporating an optical lens system that allows the light to not only appear less bright, but also focus more light directly on the plants. Because the plants now get enough light, they don’t have to stretch toward it—which caused overly tall, weak stems in the Mini 1.

I also noticed that less of the light spills over into the surrounding area—I kept the Auk Mini 2 on a console table behind the couch in my living room, and unlike the lights on most gardens I test, it wasn’t visually disruptive while I watched TV. In fact, the light was so visibly dim (in a good way) that I nearly forgot it was on.

Another possible contributing factor to the plants’ ability to stay upright was the starter kit’s new addition of a topper: a bag of fine gravel that forms a sort of crust over the top of the coco coir as the substrate absorbs water. None of the herb stems struggled to pop through, though some wore a little gravel hat for quite a while. Once they were big enough to stand upright, they stayed that way. The gravel was a little bit of a mess to apply, but I don’t advise skipping this step.

Best to Buy Now

Otherwise, the Mini Auk 1 and Mini Auk 2 are quite similar. They have an identical tension assembly for the light bar; the same little dot-studded water-level indicator wheel (seen above), where the red dot means the reservoir is empty; and they have the same nutrient schedule. (Two pumps of each bottle, “Grow” and “Flavour,” per liter of new water added.) There’s still no pump, meaning the water in the reservoir is stagnant, but it’s absorbed so quickly, within a few days when the plants are full-sized, that there’s not much risk of mold.

The Mini 1 retails for $259, and for now, the Auk Mini 2 is $229 ($249 for the espresso-and-walnut combination I tested). The Mini 2’s current price is a limited-time launch deal not likely to last past the end of the month. If you’ve been in the market for the Auk specifically, or just an easy-to-maintain indoor herb garden, this is too good a deal to pass up.

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