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Smart Gardens Will Grow Your Plants Because You're Too Good at Killing Them

Bluetooth-connected flower pots and automated hydroponic systems take all the guesswork—and probably the joy—out of gardening.
The XYZ Farm. ​Image: Author

​For many millennia, mankind has painstakingly learned to cultivate—for food and aesthetics—plants that normally grow however they want to in the wild. But this is 2015, and now we have robots to do that for us.

A host of companies, both brand new and well-established, brought their smart gardening wares to CES this year, each of them with more or less the same goal: To dummy-proof the process of growing plants. And, in some cases, to do all the work for you.

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Take, for instance, the E-Farm from XYZ, which has become well known in the 3D printing game. The smart garden box is primarily used to grow food, reps for the company told me—the lettuce the company had flourishing in the thing had been growing for roughly five weeks, with little-to-no human intervention. All you have to do is put water in the system's reservoir, select the plants you're growing from a built-in menu (it's kind of like using a microwave), and wait. Because it's all hydroponic, you don't even need soil.

If you want to have a plant, you don't want it to look like a gadget

The plants growing in it looked seriously impressive, and you have to do essentially nothing. In order for it to work correctly, you'll have to buy specific seeds from XYZ that have been formulated to work with the E-Farm. It's possible to use your own, but then you're on your own as far as playing with settings goes. The representative I spoke to said the company has no plans to get into the marijuana cultivating industry, but I suspect you could play with the settings a bit if you were so inclined.

The Parrot Pot. Image: Author

For something that takes minimally more effort, Parrot (you may know the company from its drones) introduced the Parrot Pot, in which you'll put plants that require actual dirt and real sunlight, but little else from you. The Pot has a built-in sensor, a smartphone app, and a Bluetooth chip to tell you soil moisture levels, fertilizer levels, air temperature, and sunlight levels. It's also got an auto-watering reservoir, so you don't have to do any of that, either.

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"Water is the most important of the four parameters, so we take care of it for you," Arthur Petry, who helped develop the product, told me. "We're interested in helping you grow real plants, so we didn't focus on hydroponics. We don't necessarily want to create super productive growers, we want to teach people what you need to do to grow a plant."

The future glows very, very bright. Image: Author

To do that, Parrot teamed with a Dutch university to study the conditions needed to grow more than 8,000 plants. Plants were divided into groups, so not all 8,000 plants have a specialized profile.

"We had to kill some of them to see how they lived best, but we tried not to kill too many," he said, adding that those plants died so that your own could live.

As you might expect, the Parrot Pot and the Flower Power, which is the same sensor product without the automatic water reservoir, both come with an app that seems to take all the guess work out of actually gardening. It'll send you alerts when your plant is in less-than-ideal conditions, so you can move it to a better part of the house, fertilize it, or, in the case of Flower Power, water it.

The Flower Power app tells you exactly what to do so you don't kill your plants. Image: Author

Finally, it's worth mentioning the Edyn, a product that looks much like Parrot's sensor but comes with all the inherent risks of investing in a Kickstarter, and GreenIQ's Smart Garden Hub, which is essentially a smart sprinkler system.

So, we've automated growing a garden, but how obvious do we want it to be that our green thumb is entirely robotic? Depends on who you ask. The XYZ Farm certainly looks like something from the future—something you might find on a Martian colony or something.

Meanwhile, the Parrot Pot and the Flower Power are both fairly unobtrusive—I suspect you'll be able to buy them at both a Lowe's and a Best Buy. They look, basically, like home gardening products, not some ultrafuturistic machine that defeats the point of having plants in the first place.

"If you want to have a plant, you don't want it to look like a gadget," Petry said. "Well, some people might want that, but we wanted it to look quite simple."