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gardening

July 1, 2019

FarmBot Launches Two New Robotics Kits to Give Anyone an (Automated) Green Thumb

The idea of growing my own fruits and vegetables is appealing, but the reality of that ever happening is pretty slim. I just don’t have the know-how or the patience to set up and manage a garden properly. But FarmBot, the startup that sells home gardening robot kits, could change all that as the company announced today the launch of its new Express and Express XL robots, and placed them on pre-sale for the month of July.

The FarmBot is a cartesian coordinate robot that sits on top of your raised garden. According to the company, each kit comes 95 percent pre-assembled, and should only take an hour to set up. Once that’s done, FarmBot’s software lets you drag-and-drop to map out where you want to plant your different vegetables and fruits. Then FarmBot will sow the seeds, monitor them through its on-board camera, water them properly, and even spot and remove weeds. As is par for the course these days, all of this activity can be tracked via mobile app on your phone.

The new FarmBot models won’t ship until November, but the company has put them on pre-order sale for the month of July. The Express (1.2 metes by 3 meters) will set you back $1,500 now, with the price jumping to $2,300 after the sale, and the Express XL (2.4 meters by 6 meters) will cost $2,000 during the sale, going up to $2,800 afterwards.

The other cool thing about FarmBot is that it’s completely open source — even its financials. All the CAD drawings, software and documentation is online for you to download. In fact, the entire company is open source and transparent about all of its actions and activities.

So far, FarmBot says that it’s shipped more than 1,000 kits to “early adopters” in more than 65 countries. FWIW, in December of 2018, the company reported that it sold a skosh over 800 of its previous Genesis and Genesis XL kits to bring in $2.5 million in revenue.

With its new Express and Express XL models, the company says it is “ready to bring FarmBot to the masses,” which includes not just residential customers, but small scale farmers and places like universities. And while $1,500 isn’t cheap per se, and the machine won’t be of any use for city dwellers because of its size, if the kits are as easy to set up and run as promised, that price point could get those aspiring — but failing — gardeners the robot green thumb they need.

January 17, 2019

CES 2019 Video: SeedSheet Launching Sensor for Idiot-Proof Home Gardens

Much as I love the idea of home gardening and picking fresh herbs from my windowsill to sprinkle over a pasta dish, anything I try to grow at home usually ends up dying within a few weeks. I either forget to water my plants, or else they perish due to weeds or lack of sunlight.

Maybe I should give Seedsheet a go. We wrote about this startup, which makes sheets that have pods of seeds embedded in a weed-blocking fabric, back in 2017, just a month after they got half a million bucks from Shark Tank investor Lori Greiner. Basically, it’s an idiot-proof garden.

And soon it will become even more easy to manage: in June, Seedsheet will launch a bluetooth sensor which you can stick in your Seedsheet-covered pot to give real-time data about ambient light, soil moisture, and more.

We caught up with Seedsheet CEO Cameron MacKugler on the CES floor to talk about what’s next for his company and the home gardening space in general. Give it a watch below:

The Spoon Talks to Seedsheet At CES 2019

June 30, 2017

HAMAMA’s Seed Quilts May Be Easiest Way To Become A Home Gardener Yet

There’s no shortage of new approaches to tech-powered home gardening nowadays, but HAMAMA’s Seed Quilts might be the easiest I’ve seen.

I had a chance to talk to HAMAMA CEO Daniel Goodman at the FOOD IT event put on by the Mixing Bowl this past week, who walked me through how the Seed Quilt works.

I’ll be testing out some Seed Quilts myself shortly and have a formal review later (stay tuned), but the initial impression is that Seed Quilts seems remarkably approachable in an almost smart-garden-meets-Chia-Pet kind of way.

When you sign up for a Seed Quilt subscription, you get a Grow Kit to start and three Seed Quilts. You simply put the Seed Quilt in the Microgrow Kit and water it, and in 7 days you should have some greens on their way.

According to Goodman, the Seed Quilts work with ambient light and don’t need any special lighting.

The idea of the Seed Quilt came to Goodman and his partner Camille Richman after they left MIT Media Lab where they had worked on controlled environment agriculture research. While at MIT, the two were excited about the possibilities of combining automation and agriculture but realized much of the fruits (or greens) of their labor would take some time to commercialize given the complexity of the technology. They wanted to make something more consumer accessible, and the Seed Quilt concept was born.

A subscription to Seed Quilts $14 a month all in, which gets you three Seed Quilts per month. You’ll have to buy the Grow Kit to start, which also costs $14 ($12 plus $2 shipping and handling).

You can see Dan talk about the Seed Quilt in the video above.

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