House plants are great. They can also be hard. All of those stress-reducing self-care qualities they promise tend to fade into the background when they suddenly turn brown for seemingly no reason.
Unlike pets and human children, they can’t bug you when something is wrong. They just sort of wither. There’s a reason Reddit is full of threads from confused plant owners who can’t figure out where things went wrong.
While plants can’t advocate for themselves, a number of smart home devices have sprung up in recent years that are aimed at maintaining healthy plants. Here are some high-tech — and low-tech — solutions that will keep plant owners and their plants happy for the coming year.
Here’s a really ambitious gift, with a price to match. Off the bat, I’m going to warn folks in older homes that between the water pump and the lights, the Farmstand Nook can be a bit of a power hog. In fact, I blew a couple of fuses running the system.
If your home can support it, however, it’s a great way to make your produce as locally sourced as possible: by growing it in your kitchen. Lettuce Grow offers a wide range of leafy greens and herbs that ship in seedling form. There’s something extremely satisfying about growing them hydroponically at home.
Click & Grow is another great solution for indoor gardening. The startup offers a wide selection of products, ranging from a compact smart garden to your very own three-tier vertical farm.
The Click & Grow 25 is built around a five-week growth and harvest cycle. It ships with 18 green lettuce, 18 romaine, and 18 red kale plant pods to start.
I love me a good, practical 3D printing application. U.K.-based M3D is using the technology to create some clever planters, including this one with a built-in, removable moss pole. My monstera albo is currently clinging to the sphagnum moss I’ve stuffed inside.
The pole is removable, so you can wet it without overwatering or increase its height by screwing on additional attachments. The 3D-printed pot, meanwhile, has a drainage grid to help avoid the death sentence that is root rot.
Naked Root is a small but great company that produces clever “breathing” planters. Available in a variety of sizes, the pots feature two layers. There’s the removable inner pot with aeration slits, which holds the plant. That sits inside a larger planter that servers as the reservoir for water runoff.
The combination helps avoid root rot from overwatering, while protecting the plant from becoming root bound by exposing larger roots to oxygen. Naked Root notes, “This process encourages the growth of billions of tiny root hairs, maximizing the absorption of water, nutrients, and oxygen.”
Sometimes old technology is the best technology. The use of ollas dates back more than 4,000 years, stretching across a wide range of global cultures. There’s some debate as to whether these controlled watering ceramics originated in China or North Africa. Wherever they come from, they’re still in use several millennia later.
The technology is that perfect combination of genius and simplicity. The small pots, which are made of unglazed terra-cotta/clay, are buried in soil and filled with water. The material is porous enough to let liquid pass through, but only when the soil surrounding it is dry. I’ve been using these in my elevated garden bed and smaller versions to keep my thirstier plants hydrated when I travel.
A lot of companies make versions of the pots. Here’s a set I recently picked up online.
Plant collections multiply fast. One day you wake up and you’ve got a couple dozen, each with its own light and nutrient requirements and individual watering cycles. After trying in vain to keep track of the above via Google Sheets, I recently bit the bullet and signed up for a Planta subscription.
Getting daily reminders to water and mist plants has been a game changer. Planta takes into account various factors, including climate and light coverage when creating schedules. The app can also be used to identify plants (this is a bit more hit or miss), detect light levels, and offer suggestions when a plant isn’t doing so well.
Full disclosure: This is the one product on the list I don’t have any firsthand experience with. That’s because the product isn’t scheduled to launch until January 2025. Consider this a kind of honorable mention for a cool Kickstarter project.
Soil monitors are nothing new, of course. In fact, you can get one for quite cheap these days. SmartyPlants, on the other hand, is a soil monitor for the smartphone age. The startup promises to “make it impossible to kill your plants.” The app-connected system monitors soil moisture, light levels, temperature, humidity, and even soil nutrient levels.
