Auk Mini 2 review: our favourite smart garden just got smarter, smaller and thirstier

Verdict

The Auk Mini 2 takes everything that made the original Mini a five-star favourite and quietly fixes its biggest annoyance: a water tank that couldn’t keep up with how fast the thing grows. It’s now 12% smaller, holds 25% more water, and comes with an optional app for the first time. We still think £199-209 is a lot to ask for a plant pot, however clever, but if you’ve killed one too many supermarket basil plants, this is about as close to foolproof as indoor growing gets. It’s not for anyone who wants big automated harvests fast; it’s for people who want a beautiful, silent kitchen object that happens to feed them too.

Pros

• Genuinely silent: there’s no pump, so the passive hydroponic system makes zero noise, day or night
• Sensible upgrade priorities: a bigger 3-litre tank means fewer refills despite the smaller footprint
• Open seed system: use Auk’s own pods, any third-party seeds, or cuttings, unlike pod-locked rivals
• Properly considered materials: FSC-certified wood, recycled aluminium and recyclable ABS rather than the flimsy plastic most rivals lean on

Cons

• £199-209 puts it well above budget hydroponic kits like the AeroGarden Harvest
• You still have to manually slide the light bar up as plants grow; there’s no auto-height adjustment
• Growth slows noticeably in a cold kitchen, since it leans on ambient room temperature rather than its own heating element
  
  

Quick specs

Price	£199-209 / approx. $229 (pre-order pricing, rising by batch)
Dimensions	45cm x 21cm x 35cm (50cm with light rods extended)
Weight	Around 2kg
Water tank	3 litres, lasting roughly 7-19 days depending on growth speed
Light	Custom full-spectrum LED with anti-glare optical lens, 24W (9W daily average with night mode)
Power draw	Roughly 6kWh a month, about £0.50-£1 in running costs
Control	Physical buttons, plus an optional Bluetooth app
Materials	FSC-certified wood, recycled aluminium, recyclable ABS

Design and build

The first Mini was already a good-looking piece of kit, closer to a coffee maker than a growing rig, but it took up a fair bit of counter. The Mini 2 is a genuinely smaller footprint at 45cm x 21cm x 35cm, and Auk has used that shrinkage to round off the corners and swap in a proper braided cable, which sounds trivial until you remember how many “premium” gadgets still ship with a cheap moulded flex. The materials are the real story here though. Auk builds the Mini 2 from FSC-certified wood, recycled Norwegian aluminium for the light rig, and food-safe recyclable ABS for the base and pots, which puts it well ahead of most countertop gardens on sustainability credentials rather than just claiming them in marketing copy.

It also now comes in five new colourways, including coffee walnut, coffee oak, cream oak, sage ash and terracotta beech, so it’s less likely to look like an appliance and more like something you’d actually choose to leave out. If you’re the kind of person who cares whether your kitchen gadgets match your worktop, that matters more than it should.

Growing performance

The headline fix is the water tank. The original Mini’s three-litre reservoir sounds generous until you realise fast-growing herbs can drain it in under a week, which meant regular topping up if you wanted to avoid a wilted basil situation. The Mini 2’s reservoir now runs for up to 19 days between refills, which is a genuinely useful change for anyone who travels or simply doesn’t want another daily chore.

Auk claims up to 20% faster growth thanks to third-generation hydroponic engineering, and the redesigned light plays a part in that too. Rather than the harsh, glare-y purple light that plagues cheaper grow lamps, the Mini 2 uses a custom optical lens that focuses light straight down onto the plants instead of bleeding it across the room. It’s a small thing, but it’s the difference between a grow light you can leave running near a dining table and one you have to hide in a corner.

The wider “big plant pots” are a genuinely useful addition too. The original Mini’s four pots were fine for herbs but cramped for anything with real root mass, so tomatoes and chillies never quite thrived. The new pots give fruiting plants room to actually establish, which should make the Mini 2 a more credible option for people who want more than a windowsill of basil.

How does it work?

Everything can be run from the physical buttons on the unit, including switching between light cycles. But the Mini 2 introduces an optional Bluetooth companion app for the first time, letting you toggle between Herbs & Salads mode, Fruits & Veggies mode (which pushes more far-red light for heavier blooming), and a new Slow Mode that deliberately throttles growth if you’re drowning in herbs and don’t want more.

That last one is a smart, slightly funny addition. Anyone who’s grown their own basil knows the real problem eventually isn’t killing the plant, it’s keeping up with how much it produces. Being able to dial that back rather than just letting it bolt is a genuinely practical fix, not a gimmick feature bolted on for the sake of an app existing.

Verdict

The Auk Mini 2 doesn’t reinvent the countertop garden, but it fixes the thing that annoyed us about the first one and tidies up everything else while it’s at it. The bigger tank and slower-growth mode solve the “overflowing herbs, empty reservoir” problem in one go, the new light is kinder to your kitchen, and the wider pots finally make it a sensible choice for tomatoes and chillies rather than just herbs.

The catch is still the price. £199-209 is a real ask for a plant pot, however cleverly engineered, and if you’re just after fresh basil without much fuss, cheaper hydroponic kits will get you there for less. But if you want something that looks genuinely good sitting out on a counter, makes zero noise, and doesn’t lock you into proprietary pods, the Mini 2 is one of the more thoughtfully upgraded gadgets we’ve tested this year. Buy it if design and quiet operation matter to you as much as the herbs do; skip it if you just want the cheapest route to homegrown basil.

Also consider

Click & Grow Smart Garden 9 (around $199-229): pump-free and silent like the Auk, with nine pods and a wider seed-pod catalogue, though you’re locked into Click & Grow’s proprietary pods rather than free to plant whatever you like.

AeroGarden Harvest (around $99-129): considerably cheaper and faster to germinate, but it runs on a pump that hums constantly and has a bulkier footprint that won’t win any design awards.

LG tiiun mini: a compact, design-led alternative with app monitoring similar to the Mini 2’s, worth a look if you want a brand name backing it and don’t mind a smaller growing capacity.