Growing media in greenhouses and nurseries are selected based on gas exchange, and water and nutrient holding capacity. In an effort to maintain favorable aeration and to avoid salt accumulation, irrigated and free draining root zones operate at suboptimal water and nutrient use efficiencies. We sought to design and manage a novel stratified plant-growth medium that promotes more uniform root densities than conventional growth media and improves the efficiency of water and nutrient applications. Our objectives were to (1) design and model a root zone system using optimized porous media layers,of varying pore-size, (2) instrument the root zone to monitor the water content distribution and track nutrient release and transport, and (3) compare plant growth in the layered media system to conventional, non-layered root zones. The root-zone system uses layers of Ottawa sand, where watering was achieved by maintaining a shallow saturated layer at the bottom of the column and allowing capillarity to draw water upward. Particle size varied from coarse on the bottom layers to increasingly fine particle sizes in the upper layers. The depth of each layer was optimized to constrain the water content between 50 and 85 percent saturation. The saturation distribution was verified by dual-probe heat-pulse sensors, while the nutrient concentration was sensed by in-situ electrical conductivity measurements using the same probes. Results of plant growth studies demonstrate that water contents were maintained continually during the study in the optimized media system while significantly improving the utilization of water, nutrient and soil resources. The benefits of the optimized system design include maintaining more uniform water content and on-demand supply of water compared with dynamic range of water content in designs with invariant particle sized media. The monitoring capability will offer a research tool to better describe the relationship between root-system performance and plant growth.