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Friday, 4 March 2022

Tech makes growing plants easier

Green tech at your fingertips: As is the case with almost any hobby these days, you can enlist the help of technology to support your indoor gardening ambitions. Here’s a round up of what might be useful around the web — from apps to gadgets — to help guide you through everything home botany.

If you’re not into getting your hands dirty every few days to check for moisture, there are apps to help you keep track of watering schedules for each of your plants.

Planta is a no-cost app that sends push notifications that tell you when you need to water your plants. You can pay for a premium version which has way more to offer than basic watering schedules — if you’re willing to dish out USD 35 a year you’ll get loads of helpful tips for longer term plant care.

There’s also Gardenia, which you can use to set up reminders for all the basics: Watering, repotting, applying pesticides and pruning. There’s a manual reminder option on the app as well.

Measure light intensity with your camera: Florish serves much the same function as the basic version of Planta and Gardenia but includes a light meter that helps you measure the amount of sunlight entering different parts of your home through your camera. The app can recommend plants for different parts of your home based on that reading.

If you want to get a bit more academic about it, there’s Blossom: In addition to some of the basic reminder functions available in most other plant apps, Blossom can help identify plant species through photo uploads. The app contains important information to help you care for over 10k plant species.

There are also a bunch of handy physical gadgets you can take advantage of, like the homegrown self-watering device Clayola. Similar to how most other self-watering systems function, the Clayola is designed to automatically transfer moisture from a standing water source to the soil where your plants are potted, so you don’t have to worry about them dying while you’re off on break. What’s unique about the Clayola is that it is entirely constructed from clay and can feed multiple plants using the same water source when hooked up to other clayolas using a thin hose.

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