Taking Care of Plants

I have a lot of plants in my house. I usually acquire one about every six months. When my parent's moved to Florida I grabbed a few and when Avery departed Ithaca I inherited a couple more. When people aren't giving me plants I'm buying them at "A New Leaf" - the local green house and plant store here on Slaterville Road / Rt. 79.

Today I heard about a new technology that might just save the plants I now own. I'm always forgetting to water the plants and care for them enough. My house is cool and dry in the winter and the plants get thirsty faster than I can keep up.

Enter Botanicalls - http://www.botanicalls.com/

You just put a sensor in the plant's soil and then when the plant has something to say it tells the computer to tell the phone to call you! Here are some things it can tell you:

Current call types are as follows:
-a request for water
-a confirmation of & thanks for watering
-a request for more water if initial watering was not sufficient
-a notification of unnecessary watering
-a notification of extreme need for watering when plant is excessively dry

I can definitely see that there would intially be a lot of wires all over my house, but maybe a wireless system can be developed, followed by an email based notification instead of a telephone based system.

From: The Aloe plant over the kitchen sink

To: Dave

Cc: The other plants in the house

Subject: Thanks for watering me!

Just wanted to say thanks for giving me a little water today. I'm enjoying it. Ahhh, and thanks for talking to me. As an Aloe plant people usually only see me as useful for burns and scrapes, but I'm an incredible listener. Anytime you want to go on about doing dishes I'm all ears.

Neat!

Featured today (12/19/06) on Rocketboom: http://www.rocketboom.com/vlog/

Comments

[Lauren]

How funny! The longest term relationship I have with a plant is 6 years (and it's a pothos I got from my mother... hard to kill) otherwise it seems like my relationships end at about 5 years, I get bored. :) The Christmas Cactus keeps my attention since it blooms faithfully from Thanksgiving thru Christmas.

[Dave]

I'll add "Photo and ID plants" to my possible blog posts of 2007.

[Alice]

wow...now that's some sketch ! who would have guessed 20 years ago that you will actually have php, databases and plants in the same context :)