Gadgets in the garden

NEW TECHNIQUES: The fantasy is that technology will make gardening easier, but it won't be very good exercise for the gardener.

I am a garden dinosaur. Actually, I'm an everything dinosaur, since I'm the only person I know who doesn't have an iPhone or an iPad, and who can't send photos from her mobile or receive texts on it, or get it to do anything other than make and answer calls.

Friends ridicule me at Friday night drinks because, while they're busy playing with gadgets, all I do is look out the window and savour the wine.

Now all this smart technology is encroaching on the garden. Over the past few weeks I've been offered sticky tapes with carrot seeds on them, hairy mats impregnated with vegetable seeds, and "fusion" pellets containing seeds of three or four salad greens. Good grief. I'd only just got used to the word "fusion" as applied to cuisine. How sad am I.

And there's worse to come. I've just read that Nasa technology has been used to produce glasses that help you diagnose plant problems. By blocking out green light waves, the glasses highlight areas where colour changes on grass are beginning to occur, signalling disease in your lawn. I am so not telling The Landscaper about that!

And a well known tool company is now selling a sensor that measures four aspects of proper planting: sunlight, temperature, soil nutrients and moisture. You stick it in the garden, then plug it into your computer for a full report on what is best planted there. I'm wondering, though, whether it'll be able to tell that the cat has just peed in that bit of garden, temporarily altering the soil pH.

It gets worse. Two guys somewhere overseas are developing an indoor garden "pod", which collects information from Wi-Fi-capable probes in your garden and can send it to a social network to share info on growing conditions, weather and the like. The pods collect data on water temperature, pH, light and so on and share it so other gardeners will know what to do.

Evidently, there's already a website that plans your garden for you. You tell it where you live, it tells you what to plant and when, designs your garden, and gives you daily reminders of what you should be doing.

Now, if the sight of a houseplant drooping so severely that its leaves are touching the floor doesn't alert you to the fact that the thing is thirsty, you need a water stick, which has an LED light that flashes after determining the moisture of a houseplant's soil. It has a range of colours, which represent different water needs, from dry to over-watered. It also turns itself on when the natural light has gone - perfect, obviously, for those of us who can't tell night from day.

There's even something for those who cannot tell hot from cold. I remember years ago getting heaps of flak for buying an electric blanket for our antique cat. Now, if I wanted to, I could buy one for raising seedlings. There is such a thing as a thermostat-controlled heat-mat that keeps seedlings at the optimum temperature. The probe measures soil temperature, turning the mat on and off to regulate the heat.

And here's the scariest one. Botanicalls, a collaboration between artists and technologists in the US, has designed a do-it-yourself kit with a sensor that goes into the soil to measure moisture. When a plant gets too dry, it posts, asking "water me, please" and this is sent to your mobile phone. Or something like that. When you water the plant, it posts again to say "thank you".

As the website says: "Botanicalls Kits let plants reach out for human help! They offer a connection to your leafy pal via online Twitter status updates." Oh please.

I have to admit, I did find two items I thought might be useful without involving me in anything to do with Facebook, Twitter, Wi-Fi or sticking electronic devices in my pot plants. The Garden Defence Owl is, you guessed it, a plastic owl that you put in the garden. When the sensor in the battery-operated bird detects a woodland creature, the owl's head turns to fix the intruder with a murderous stare, and frightens it away. Of course, we don't have a lot of woodland creatures in our garden, or a lot of owls, but I figured a plastic harrier might be handy to keep rats and mice out of the compost bin and birds away from the plum tree. You'd think three cats would do the trick but, sadly, not.

Perhaps even better would be a device produced by engineering students at the University of Victoria in British Columbia. Challenged with finding a way of deterring garden pests, they invented the Garden Gnome Drone, a small, noisy machine that rises off its landing pad when infrared sensors detect an intruder, then flies a circuit around the garden. With a dog, two ducks, three cats, two chickens, a hare, a flock of quail and a few pheasants on our property, the batteries sure wouldn't last long.