Great news for anyone who has ever been told to unplug and touch grass! Whether you’re a natural green thumb or not, it’s easier than ever to grow plants indoors. Don’t know when to water your plants? There’s an app for that. Need a constant flow of fresh basil for all your pesto needs? Hydroponics will solve your problems. Some tech startups are even manipulating the DNA of plants to make them bioluminescent or better at cleaning the air. When it comes to tech gifts for plant lovers, the world is yours oyster plant.
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Plant Watering Applications: Greg and Planta
Image Credits: Greg
I have a bit of a problem with plants. I have exactly 26 plants in my one bedroom apartment and I can tell you this exact number because I use a plant watering app called Greg and I counted them all. Each of my plants has its own custom watering schedule built by the Greg app, taking into account many factors: the type of plant, the size and material of its pot, its proximity to a window, which way the window faces, how much near it is on a heater or AC unit… the list goes on. It would be very difficult to remember the specific needs of each of my plants, but I don’t even have to think about it. Greg tells me that my Monstera is thirsty and I listen.
But Greg can even learn from your own behaviors—for example, you might have noticed that your philodendron’s leaves are drooping a lot, but according to Greg, you shouldn’t water it for a few more days. Trust your intuition. This plant needs water! And when you tell Greg that you watered your plant early, he’ll learn and grow, just like your plants.
The plant app market is a bit saturated — I got on the Greg train early because I wrote about them when they first raised seed funding (yes, a plant app raised seed funding), and I fell in love with the app. But Planta is probably more popular than Greg and offers similar services.
I tried Planta for comparison and it’s a good app. Unlike Greg, it has a light meter and its watering schedules are a bit more accurate, giving you alerts to mist the plants or fertilize them as well. But Planta works by grouping your plants according to the room in your house they are in. This doesn’t work for me at all, although others may find it useful. Yes, my snake plant is in the same room as my cacti that sit directly in a brutally hot south facing window, but the snake plant is 15 feet behind the window, and thus needs a slightly different watering schedule.
Each app has its own built-in community forum where you can ask questions about your plants to a community of experts. As a concerned plant owner who still believes that “bright indirect light” is subjective, I have found the forums very helpful.
Both Greg and Planta charge a monthly or annual fee for their services – Greg costs $30 per year, while Planta costs $35.99 for the year. Whatever you buy for the plant lover in your life, you can’t go wrong.
Image Credits: Adam Illingworth for Click + Grow
Price: $160.99 on Amazon
Home hydroponics has been popular for quite some time and remains the kind of gift that keeps on giving. Every time your loved one sprinkles local cilantro on their tacos, they’ll be thinking of you. For less expensive, consumer grow systems, you’ll come across the AeroGarden and the Click + Grow, but honestly, I just think the Click + Grow models look a lot more modern. Then again, my grandma has had an AeroGarden since I was a kid and is happy with it, so you have options. But when I decided to buy my mom a hydroponic garden one year, I went with Click + Grow and we were happy with the results.
Like its competitors, Click + Grow sells seed pods — perfectly sized clumps of soil with seeds inside — that you drop into the machine. Then all you have to do is fill the water tank every now and then. Most Click + Grow models are not app compatible, but have a built-in clock that will turn the grow lights on and off. If you really want to make it accurate, you can buy some automated plugs to customize your light schedule.
Click + Grow can grow edible vegetables like tomatoes, peppers, and cabbage, but you need a large system to be able to grow anything substantial, otherwise you can only enjoy the novelty of eating two or three home-grown tomatoes. This is why these systems are best used for herbs, which can spice up your meal with just a few leaves.
While it might be more romantic to give your partner an actual bouquet of flowers, you can actually purchase flower pods for your Click + Grow. This bouquet might last a week or so, but what if you could grow your own petunias all the time? (My mom, for the first time, chose to grow petunias instead of lettuce.)
Click + Grow’s most expensive model retails for around $100, but they often go on sale — at the time of writing, you can get it for 25% off. The Smart Garden 3 can only grow three pods at once, but it’s small and sleek enough to sit on your kitchen counter without taking up too much space.
Inner garden of Rise Gardens. Image Credits: Rise Gardens
If you’re willing to spend a serious chunk of change to start your new life as an indoor farmer, a Click + Grow or AeroGarden bench won’t cut it.
We’ve been following Rise Gardens since their first round (again, they write the puns themselves) in 2020, and after hitting over a million dollars in sales, they’ve raised another $9 million in the following year. Some of these more advanced systems can cost close to $1,000, such as the Gardyn, which is absolutely beautiful, but way out of most people’s price range. Rise Gardens also has some heavy machinery, but you can buy them 12-foot model for $349giving you more bang for your buck than a click + zoom.
Rise Gardens’ larger models can break four figures, but are designed to look like living furniture, made of steel and wood. If you have the money, is it like buying a piece of art that you can also eat? Is this strange?
These systems are easy to maintain—just fill the water tank once a week—but more advanced home gardeners can up the ante if they tire of the luxury of fresh basil on demand.
“We wanted something that was flexible because once you master a hobby, you get bored,” founder Hank Adams told TechCrunch in a previous interview. “You can start at one level and change tray caps to grow denser. We have a microgreens kit that you can add or plant supports for tomatoes and peppers. You can also make a trellis for sniping peas.’
Plants that defy nature: Lightbio and Neoplants
So, you might want to keep things simple and buy your loved one a plant. Sure, I could tell you that a purple inch plant is an easy way to bring color into the home, or that a snake plant is really easy to keep happy (but it’s toxic to pets, so beware!). But what if you could buy a weird, Mewtwo-like plant that was engineered to be cool?
Lightbio, an Idaho-based startup, just got approval from the US Department of Agriculture to sell glow-in-the-dark petunias. The company genetically engineered these plants to glow using the DNA of a bioluminescent mushroom. Glowing plants are not a new discovery – one of the founders, Dr. Keith Wood was part of a team that first made a plant glow in 1986, using firefly genes. But Lightbio may be the first company to make these plants more readily available for purchase.
You can register now to enter the waiting list buy your own bioluminescent unit, but the company told TechCrunch that its recent USDA approval will speed things up significantly.
If you’re more interested in fresh air than a plant that looks like a firefly, Neoplants has built a plant designed to help you breathe easier at home. The company claims that one of its plants has the same air-purifying ability as 30 regular houseplants (that’s great news for me, someone who—as it turned out—has exactly 26 plants).
As our own Romain Dillet explained when he interviewed the founder of Neoplants last year, these plants target a specific type of indoor pollutant that tends to avoid traditional air purifiers. While plants normally metabolize carbon dioxide, Neoplants’ Neo P1 has modified DNA that allows it to metabolize atmospheric pollutants.
You can take your very own Neoplant for $179but you’ll need to get on a waiting list before you can get your hands on the world’s weirdest air purifier.
