When it comes to designing your home, hi tech gadgets are probably a top priority. However, when it comes to your lawn and garden, you probably never realized there is technology that can make your lawn greener, your flowers more vibrant and your veggies, well – veggies, all the year round. Here are a few tips, tricks and gadgets you probably never thought about that will help you have the ultimate hi tech lawn and garden.
Gardening Apps for Your Smartphone
While an app called A Gardener’s Handbook: Volume 1 is available for free (Android) in the Google Play Store, there are probably a dozen or more such apps that will help you figure out why a pepper is growing on your tomato plant or your greens are actually more yellow than green. If you are looking to cure your lawn of chinch bugs, there is a solution and technology is here to help you find it NOW, not after your lawn is fodder for every pest in the neighborhood.
Garden Cams or Simple Wireless Security Cams
How many times have you woken up in the morning only to find that bites have been taken off all your greens and every single strawberry has been eaten off your plants? Wouldn’t you like to know what is happening so that you can rid your garden of these pests?
If so, you can get a garden cam for right around $200 on Amazon or use a remote web cam to keep an eye on your garden throughout the night. Simply set to record on time lapse and you’ll probably catch those little critters in the act. After all, you can’t rid your garden of a pest if you don’t know what it is, right?
Did You Know You Can Control Brother Sun?
One of the biggest problems for those growing in greenhouses is that there are plants that thrive on a specific amount of sunlight during the day. Sometimes the days are too long for a plant to go into a flowering stage where the ‘fruit’ will be produced so even farmers with greenhouses need to wait for a 12/12 (or less) cycle of light to darkness.
Some gardeners make it their daily duty to completely cover the greenhouse with a light deprivation fabric but you can also buy an amazingly innovative automatic light deprivation greenhouse that automates everything for you based on controls you have set. In other words, you can control it to darken your greenhouse for 14 hours of the day, letting sunlight shine through for only 10 if that is what is ideally suited for your crops. And the best news yet? You set the controls once and let the greenhouse worry about the rest! (Unless there is a power outage or surge that is!)
It’s a No Brainer!
Then there are the hobbyist gardeners who know absolutely nothing – or very little at best – about what kinds of plants do well in their region. Some will try to grow tropical plants in the far northern regions of the country while others will try to grow plants that require a winter dormant season in South Florida.
Others still will space their plants incorrectly or water them too infrequently for their needs and all of this could have been avoided with a neat iPad app called Garden Plan Pro that offers advice on everything from spacing plants to what kinds of plants do best in your region to checking the weather before you begin preparing your garden bed (or lawn). Why a no brainer? Because you can know relatively little and Garden Plan Pro along with iPad will fill in all the blanks for you so that you can literally have the best lawn and garden in town – and without a single original thought!
And Now You Can Say a Special Thanks to the Techies Who Made It All Possible!
These are just a few of the tips, tricks and hi tech gadgets that will have you gardening like a pro in no time at all. From auto daylight-sensing grow lights and light deprivation greenhouses, to gadgets that tell you the ground is too moist or too dry, there is something technology has to offer that will tell you what you need to do, and how.
All this is possible because of technology and if there isn’t already a solution, don’t panic, some techie somewhere is already working on it! Perhaps the only thing not available is a robot to do the actual labor for you, but then again, those are probably in prototype as well!