This smart garden can give you organic produce year-round

By Lulu Chang Published May 7, 2021

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For those concrete jungle dwellers looking to bring a little bit of the real jungle into your lives, technology has an answer for you. Meet the Nectar by Hummingbird, a system that helps you garden regardless of where you are. The St. Louis based team of three have been working on their technology for over a year, and now, the fruits of their labor have taken life. The Nectar is a box measuring 4 feet tall, 18 inches wide, and 20 inches long, and boasts a suite of sensors and microcontrollers that detect what your plants need to adjust the environment accordingly.

There’s no soil involved, nor is there water, but there is life. Thanks to a nutrient solution that you can buy online or in gardening shops, you can do your gardening from within your studio apartment. Supposedly, there’s no mess involved and you’ll still be able to work on your green thumb. And of course, because this is the 21st century and we’re inseparable from our smartphones, the Nectar is controlled by a companion app that gives you the power to adjust the humidity, pH levels, temperature, and lighting of the enclosure.

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As per the Nectar website, the ultimate draw for this indoor gardening system lies in the availability of organic food grown in your own home, no matter what the season. And thanks to its small size, you should be able to fit the Nectar just about anywhere.

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While the original idea may have been to use the Nectar to grow basil and tomatoes, there’s also a more … interesting application for the smart gardening system as well. As co-founder Danny Varghese noted in an interview with the St. Louis Post Dispatch, the marijuana industry could become a major market for these systems. “I found out that there is a large subset of marijuana users in Colorado who spend around $5,000 per person per year on marijuana,” Varghese said. “These people are really in pain right now. They are spending big money on marijuana.” But with Nectar, Varghese says, users may be able to cut down on costs.

So no matter what you’re looking to grow, if you’ve a penchant for gardening, this just may be the smart home system for you.

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Fascinated by the effects of technology on human interaction, Lulu believes that if her parents can use your new app…

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