Tag Archives: gardening

Whimsical 3D-printed watering can creates an illusion of a spiral waterslide

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Designed to make the watering can look a little less mundane, the Coil is a rather eye-catching little number that uses an optical illusion of sorts to create a product that’s fun and whimsical to the eye and touch. “Coil is a contemporary take on an age-old tool: the watering can,” say Robert Shudra and Markus Melcher, the designers at Plural. “While many people own watering cans – and several elegant designs exist – the structure remains unimaginative, generally consisting of a container, open at the top with a spout and handle.”

Designer: Plural Creative

The Coil’s engaging design features a single-piece body where the spout wraps itself dramatically into a cylinder, before branching out to become a handle. Fill the water into the empty vessel and its coiled body fills up with water too, which empties out of the spout when you tip the can over.

The only way to realize this product is through resin 3D printing. The 3D-printed product has a wonderful smokey translucent texture along with a meticulous finish that can only be achieved through this manufacturing process. The interiors are absolutely hollow, without any support structures, creating a product that truly looks magical, and feels absolutely enchanting to use while watering plants, or potentially even using with a pour-over coffee maker.

Coil dynamically fills through a spiral waterslide, resembling an unexpected pairing of delicate chemistry equipment and ‘crazy straws’ from our youth.

A closer look at the resin 3D-printed design reveals the hollow coiled body and an integrated, but sealed-off handle that doesn’t gather water.

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LEGO launches its botanical collection to merge building blocks with gardening

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LEGO’s Botanical Collection marks the toy company’s latest effort in merging the joyful pastime of building blocks with the meditative work of gardening.

Two of the more popular pastimes to have gained traction during the pandemic have been gardening and building with LEGOs. It seems everyone is filling their homes with flower bouquets and greenery. While there’s no replacement for growing our own gardens, LEGO recently launched a collection of blocks that allow people to build their own bouquets and greenery with LEGO blocks. Dubbed the Botanical Collection, users will be able to replicate flowers like Birds of Paradise and orchids with corresponding LEGO blocks.

Designer: LEGO

Designed to provide users with a means for rest and relaxation, the Botanical Collection is like a sort of three-dimensional puzzle that merges the childhood joy of LEGO building blocks with the patient game of jigsaw puzzles. While children and adults enjoy collecting LEGO blocks and building microscopic cityscapes from that collection, the Botanical Collection marks a clear effort from the toy block’s company to ‘adultify’ their collection of LEGOs.

The Bird of Paradise collection features over 1,000 building blocks so users can take their time constructing artful three-dimensional replicas of bouquets and plant life. In addition to the Bird of Paradise option, the Botanical Collection includes pieces to build orchids, succulents, full bouquets, bonsai trees, and whatever else your imagination concocts.

On rainy days, when gardening isn’t an option, LEGO’s new Botanical Collection offers a moment of indoor respite for those of us with green-thumbed tendencies. Of the succulent collection, the designers at LEGO encourage adults to, “Discover the deeper virtues of our resilient friends. Venture into the plant kingdom and let your green fingers do what they do best, with this creative and relaxing build.”

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Modern indoor gardening solutions to help cultivate the perfect personal green space at home

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Gardening is an extremely therapeutic activity, and though I may not engage in it all the time, the few times that I have, I found it really delightful and soothing. Growing, tending to, and being surrounded by plants is intensely satisfying, all your worries slowly fade away, and you are simply enthralled by nature. However, not everyone has access to outdoor gardens, especially with the pandemic locking up most of us in our homes. Indoor gardening is a modern solution that works perfectly in our modern homes. From LG’s latest indoor gardening appliance that is 3 feet tall to an indoor vertical garden with a bio-filter, we have a myriad range of options when it comes to growing plants within the comfort of your home! These unique, innovative, and thoughtful designs promise to take care of all your indoor gardening needs. And I don’t know about you, but I’m really considering trying one of them out, I wouldn’t mind adding indoor gardening to my daily routine!

1. The LG tiiun

Designed as a unique home appliance that lets you grow your own herbs and veggies the LG tiiun was announced in the run-up to CES 2022. The indoor gardening appliance is roughly the size of a dorm refrigerator, standing at approximately 3 feet tall, and features two shelves that can accommodate up to 6 all-in-one seed packages and various seed kits. The term tiiun comes from the Korean word meaning ‘to sprout’ and is LG’s way of indicating that this appliance is an all-in-one self-sufficient garden. The appliance creates a perfect microclimate and all the right conditions for the plants to grow, even mimicking light cycles so you could potentially keep your tiiun anywhere in a room without worrying about access to proper sunlight.

2. Vertex Zero

Requiring no water for maintenance, Vertex Zero is a terrarium that encases real, biologically inactive moss, cultivated in TerraLiving’s own greenhouse and preserved in labs, inside museum-grade geometric glass containers. Live mosses are grown and cultivated in TerraLiving’s greenhouse dubbed the “Moss Lab,” before reaching the peak of their health and preserved for encasement. Using proprietary advanced preservation technology, each patch of live moss is stripped of any water content in low-pressure zones and subzero temperatures to freeze their proteins and biological components, rendering them inactive, but frozen in time.

3. Planterior

A LEGO-inspired indoor garden called Planterior by designer Dasol Jeong merges LEGO’s building blocks with the frame of a bulletin board to create a unique, modular garden system for any WFH space. Planterior keeps the shape and size of a traditional bulletin board and integrates a gardening system into its structure to bring greenery to any workspace. Describing Planterior’s inspiration in their own words, Dasol notes, “Due to the influence of fine dust and COVID-19, people, who do not have the opportunity to access plants outdoors, are increasingly putting plants into their homes…Home gardening and plant territories are gaining vitality [as a result].”

4. Vista

Too many of the smart gardens on the market today prioritize function over aesthetics, amounting to cold, vertical farms that would look more at home in a research center’s greenhouse than a living room. That’s why designer Juhyuck Han created Vista, a smart garden appliance that mimics a landscape’s natural terrain and scales it down to fit in our homes. Designed to either stand-alone or be mounted on an interior wall, Vista takes up around the same space as a large fish tank. Featuring a hydroponic gardening system, Vista’s grow tray mimics the terrain of a natural landscape to bring users closer to nature. Through an immersive structure and smart technology, Vista combines functionality with aesthetics to create a gardening experience.

5. Elpo

Inspired to provide an air filter for collaborative spaces, designers Kārlis Vītols, Lolita Epnere, Buka Bērziņa ushered Elpo into the office, a smart biofilter that doubles as a teeming, indoor garden. By absorbing airborne toxins and gases into their leaves and sending them down to their roots, some plants are able to help purify the air we breathe. Equipped with a smart biofilter, it’s not only the plants that Elpo uses to improve indoor air quality. Like many modern indoor gardens, Elpo comes stocked with automated, smart technology that lights, fans, and irrigates the potted greenery. In creating a smart biofilter that doubles as an indoor garden, Elpo improves indoor air quality while also functioning as a room divider in office settings.

6. The BloomingTables

Designed to be the world’s first ‘living furniture series’, the patent-pending BloomingTables allow you to grow herbs and vegetables, cultivate microgreens, or enjoy the beauty of succulents and vining plants in the comfort of your home. With homes and apartments growing smaller and balconies becoming more of a luxury, the BloomingTables provide a uniquely aesthetic compromise – giving you a table along with the added benefit of a tiny terrarium for your house plants. The BloomingTables come in 4 sizes – a desk, coffee table, entryway table, and a side table – all featuring a waterproof acrylic trough-shaped base and a flat glass panel on top. Each table is equipped with a drain valve at the bottom (just in case you want to drain out any excess water from your planter’s soil), and the glass panel on top is removable too, allowing you to easily water, prune, and tend to your plants!

7. The Bridge

The Bridge builds on the increasingly popular idea of an open office and a collaborative workspace (as opposed to compartmentalized cabin spaces). It’s entirely made from plywood and can be flat-packed to a location and assembled on spot. It uses wooden joineries instead of metal/glue fixtures, and can be assembled and propped onto any open desk, uplifting your current workspace with a neat touch of greenery. The channels are big enough to hold potted plants and they give you the freedom to add plants of your own choice. Since the plants sit in their own planters (instead of directly in the wooden channel), they can easily be watered too without worrying about wood-rot or exposing the plywood to excess water/moisture. Just be slightly wary against dropping water on the expensive computers/equipment below!

8. The Smart Landscape Growframe

Designed by Modern Sprout, the Smart Landscape Growframe is a minimal frame that can be mounted on any wall on your home, and whose functionality is more complex than its simple looks! It nourishes all kinds of plants – from ones that seek low light, to ones that seek bright light. Once mounted on a wall, you can slide your favorite plants into the Growframe, and connect to the Modern Sprout app. The app is a complete godsend! The app features an on/off switch and can be used for customizable programming and pairing recommendations for partial shade, partial sun, and full sun plants. You can easily select and switch between light settings.

9. WALTY

Designed to take the absolute hassle out of watering and taking care of your plants, WALTY gives them the water they need by simply pulling it out of the atmosphere. Because a singular plant can’t generate and capture enough atmospheric humidity as an entire forest, WALTY basically does that part for your plant. Now it might sound borderline magical, but the way WALTY works is similar to a dehumidifier. A dehumidifier pulls moisture from the air using cold plates that force water droplets to condense on them. The droplets then drip down into a reservoir tank, and when it fills up, you simply empty it out. WALTY’s approach is similar, except it uses that very water to keep your plant hydrated… sort of like a win-win.

10. Vega’s modular planter

Vega’s modular planter was designed to be a solution for vertical farming in small living spaces. Starting with a single modular cube, seeds can be planted and harvested using traditional planting methods, then another module can be positioned on top of the first cube, forming a link for additional planters to be added. Each modular planter comes as a dish with an accompanying cubic case that grants room for the crops and plants to grow and reach their full height. Inspired by the look and durability of Japanese metabolism and Social modernism architecture, Lorenzo Vega conceptualized his vertical farm to be stripped-down and clean by design. The sleek, simple finish of Vega’s modular planter echoes its intuitive usability and modular customization.

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This smart self-watering indoor planter is a futuristic appliance that is almost sculptural in nature

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Indoor gardening became all the craze during this pandemic! Since we spent most of our time indoors, gardening became a therapeutic activity that we could engage in. Growing, tending to, and being surrounded by plants is intensely satisfying, all your worries slowly fade away, and you are simply enthralled by nature. Indoor planters are a great option, to nurture plants within the comfort of your own home. They are simple, modern, and almost wholly self-sufficient. The Klaustrafloria planter is one such example! The tall cage-like planter has a sleek futuristic appeal. Available in a stark white color, the planter has been amped with phytolamps, a backlight, and an automatic watering system.

A decorative cage, within which the plants grow, makes up the main body of the planter, followed by a base that consists of a removable inner pot, a water chute, a LED water level indicator, an auto watering system, and a 12-liter water tank. The removable inner pot includes containers that are filled with drainage rocks. Once planted, the plants sprout their roots through the slots in the containers, within 2-3 months. Water is supplied to the plant via the water chute which is connected to the reservoir of water below. Once the plants have grown for more than 2-3 months, they are able to supply themselves with the amount of water they need, owing to the self-watering system. After the 4th month, you only need to fill up the water reservoir once it’s dry. An intuitive indicator lets you know when to fill it, and how much water to fill it with.

The planter is equipped with built-in phytolamps. These lights are extremely useful in the case of young plants, or when it’s winter season, and there isn’t enough light. The LED lights emit light from the exact spectrum that the plants need for photosynthesis. Also, the automatic watering system doesn’t require any power! The phytolamps, backlight, and the indicator that displays the water level, are powered by a power plug, which is inserted at the back of the planter.

The Klaustrafloria is a smart self-watering planter that takes the best care of our plants, as we manage our modern lifestyles. Planters like these make indoor gardening a true pleasure and also super easy to practice.

Designer: Vladimir Popov

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This smart frame is a full spectrum grow light that helps you achieve all your indoor gardening aspirations!

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If you have a green thumb and a deep love for plants, but find your modern apartment too dim to nurture your beloved plants, then this frame-shaped full spectrum grow light is the one for you!

Designed by Modern Sprout, the Smart Landscape Growframe is a minimal frame that can be mounted on any wall on your home, and whose functionality is more complex than its simple looks! It nourishes all kinds of plants – from ones that seek low light, to ones that seek bright light.

Once mounted on a wall, you can slide your favorite plants into the Growframe, and connect to the Modern Sprout app. The app is a complete godsend! The app features an on/off switch and can be used for customizable programming and pairing recommendations for partial shade, partial sun, and full sun plants. You can easily select and switch between light settings.

Using LEDs with a long lifespan, the Growframe produces a natural white light, that supports the healthy growth of a variety of plants, such as jade, types of ferns, crotons, alocasia to even flavorful herbs and leafy greens! If you love your salad greens and microgreens, then this frame is perfect for growing them as well. All you need is a 2.4GHz wifi network for the Growframe to function!

Guaranteed to work for almost 25,000 hours, the Smart Landscape Growframe helps you create a miniature garden within your own home. You can create different natural landscapes, from a desert-scape to a tropical paradise, depending upon the kind of plants you choose to grow!

Designer: Modern Sprout

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This public horticultural pod cultivates plants and multi-generational relationships through the act of gardening!

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The act of gardening provides many proven physical and mental health benefits that alone make cultivating your own garden worth it. Taking it one step further, community gardens carry the same benefits and then some. Interacting with members of your own community while growing plant life, crops, and flowers not only makes fresh food available for all of those who help cultivate it but also brings people closer together in the process. Enrich Group, a team of designers with Virginia Tech University, created their own community greenhouse to help forge human connections and bridge generational gaps within the community.

Gardening promotes many physical and mental health benefits, including an increase in physical activity, relaxation, and access to fresh food. Enrich Group aimed to combine physical activity and mental relaxation with an environment that cultivates multi-generational relationships with their community greenhouse. Following a year of social isolation, Enrich Group built their own community greenhouse because they believe age is nothing but a number and doesn’t change each aging individual’s desire to connect and build meaningful relationships within their own community. Cultivating genuine relationships between people from different generations through the act of gardening is the “embodiment of purposeful living,” notes Enrich Group, ensuring that “we all have the chance to grow, together.”

The greenhouse’s interior is designed to feel similar to traditional meeting spaces, with an island or table in its center that contains the garden’s main communal herb garden. The main island is also multi-tiered to optimize the greenhouse’s interior space. Hanging plant fixtures form an outer ring above the island’s main communal herb plot. In addition to the plants’ tub, gardening spaces around the pod’s perimeter feature health monitors for each plant, sliding storage bins with open handles for easy accessibility, as well as a general working space. The greenhouse appears as an approachable, modern, and public hub with glass-coated acrylic panels, aluminum ribbing, and a wooden entryway.

Designer: Enrich Group

Enrich Group’s community garden, called Enrich features an exterior design close enough to traditional greenhouses to fit any outdoor space.

Inside, community members can develop interpersonal relationships as well as grow crops.

Enrich wears an approachable design, inviting community members to come inside and tend to the garden.

Around the perimeter of the gardening hub, plant pots and tubs can be found alongside workspaces and sliding drawers.

In the center of each pod, a communal herb plot creates more space for gardening.

Before tending to your own plot, Enrich provides a preliminary survey that reveals what type of gardener you are.

The location of your garden can be chosen according to your community of residence.

Gardeners can also select what types of crops they’d prefer to grow.

At its core, Enrich operates as a social hub for multi-generational relationships to thrive.

This LEGO-inspired modular planter upgrades vertical farming for gardening in tiny living spaces!

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In recent years, more people have been trying out gardening and harvesting their own vegetables for cooking and eating. While plenty of planter designs have been created specifically for small living spaces, many of them keep a pretty small size, not allowing for too many plants to grow at the same time. Lorenzo Vega, a designer based in Chile, designed his own interpretation of a modular planter and it leans on a modular structure inspired by LEGO building blocks so the vertical farm can always increase in size if your space allows for it.

Vega’s modular planter was designed to be a solution for vertical farming in small living spaces. Starting with a single modular cube, seeds can be planted and harvested using traditional planting methods, then another module can be positioned on top of the first cube, forming a link for additional planters to be added. Each modular planter comes as a dish with an accompanying cubic case that grants room for the crops and plants to grow and reach their full height. Inspired by the look and durability of Japanese metabolism and Social modernism architecture, Lorenzo Vega conceptualized his vertical farm to be stripped-down and clean by design. The sleek, simple finish of Vega’s modular planter echoes its intuitive usability and modular customization.

Stackable and modular product designs are a Godsend for those of us living in tiny spaces. Taking full advantage of the height in any given room opens the space up to many more interior design possibilities and grants access to hard-to-reach areas of the apartment that would otherwise remain unused. Vega’s modular planter was designed for a small space and that’s where it feels right at home.

Designer: Lorenzo Vega

Identical modules can be stacked on top of one another for vertical farming in tiny living spaces.

A cubic case slides right over the dish planter to allow the crops and plants to reach their full heights.

Additional modules can easily be joined together to form links around preceding cubes.

Notches on the planter lock into place with the sockets on the planter’s frame case.

Vega’s modular planter can be positioned either outdoors or indoors.

Vega took to architecture for inspiration, specifically Japanese metabolic and Social modernist structures.

This indoor garden lets you grow up to thirty plants in the comfort of your home!

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We all miss the farmer’s market– those Sunday mornings, spending hours outside sifting through bins of locally grown kale and ripe cherry tomatoes. With the ongoing pandemic, those mornings feel like eons ago. While being in packed spaces like outdoor farmer’s markets is still discouraged, designs like indoor gardens provide ways for us to stay indoors and still get our farm-fresh produce without rubbing elbows with strangers. Gardyn, is one indoor garden that allows users to grow up to 30 different kinds of plants, needing no more than two feet worth of space.

The automatic gardening device, Gardyn uses hydroponic technology and app-powered maintenance to grow an assortment of seeds handpicked by each user. The thirty chosen yCubes stocked with seeds easily slide into the slots that dot Gardyn’s frame and sprouts appear within only a few days through app-integrated maintenance. An accompanying app called Kelby, essentially tracks the health status of the plants that fill out Gardyn, including water and humidity levels, temperature, as well as LED light dispersion. Through two high-resolution cameras, Kelby analyzes each plant’s development and adjusts the system’s parameters to optimize plant growth. In only four to five weeks, users can dig into their first harvest.

Gardyn’s fully-autonomous gardening system comes equipped with a six-gallon water reservoir that contains all the nourishment necessary for plants to grow for weeks. The system’s trademarked hybriponic technology also recirculates that water, along with air and supplementary nutrients in a closed-loop for the system’s roots to remain nourished and also to reduce water consumption by 95% when compared to traditional watering methods. The entire Gardyn system– the yPods, the aluminum columns, and the water reservoir– are made of high-quality, FDA-compliant, 100% recyclable materials to ensure that your garden is growing as naturally as possible.

Designer: Gardyn Tech

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Requiring no more than two feet, Gardyn can fit into any kitchen or garage!

Gardyn’s simple, sophisticated design even fits into your living room.

From a wide array of available seeds, Gardyn can grow anything from wheatgrass to dill, along with cherry tomatoes and even strawberries.

The trademarked yPods are made with recyclable materials and don’t need to be washed before use.

Along with Gardyn’s integrated watering system, plant nutrients come with each indoor gardening device.

Kelby, Gardyn’s accompanying app automatically takes care of your plants by tracking their development with two high-resolution cameras.

This modular vertical planter comes with automatic irrigation for millennial-friendly gardening!

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Many of us urban dwellers don’t have the time and space to enjoy indoor plants. CitySens is a vertical garden that is specially tailored for such a restricted space home, which helps its inhabitants enjoy greenery indoors without any hassle. The design is an easy to assemble contraption, comprising a base, pot modules, and a handful of frame pieces that can be assembled in a range of options to configure a vertical garden with shelves to any individual/family need or available space.

There is an underlining requirement of space-saving gardening equipment that people with not just space but time crunch need at home without worrying about their plants’ health. This need is met here because the planter itself can take care of the greens’ nutritional needs. Of course, there are many types of indoor growing solutions with automatic irrigation tech on the market, but since the CitySens combines vertical planters, plant shelves, and self irrigation systems in one, it is a concept worth its weight in green. Very unique in terms of versatility and performance, CitySens brings nature into our city homes (sans gardens) and adapts to the needs of everyday changing lifestyle.

CitySens comes with a range of plants designed to grow in its hydroponics system (which grows plants without soil). These plants are specifically designed to meet the individual tastes and available light conditions. The plants in the CitySens thrive on a closed, circulating irrigation system that reportedly saves up to 50-percent water and mineral salts compared to traditional irrigation systems. Interestingly, this planting system does a nifty little bit more – it can sync with a smartphone for regular updates of plant health and cares for the growing plants in your absence for over a month. Yes, that’s the level of independence the CitySens can offer. If you want a gardening system capable of maximizing the greenery and improving the air quality at home, CitySens can make for a good viable option.

Designer: Lúcid Design Agency

This smart microgreens garden resembles a wall-mounted circular Dyson fan!

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Micro-gardening has been a trend in urban areas but it had an explosive growth during the pandemic. Quarantine turned many people into home chefs and having fresh basil to top your pizza brings you a little ‘solace’ during uncertain times. Not everyone has a patio or a rooftop to cultivate microgreens so we turn to Solace – a design that makes growing these vegetables easier and more accessible!

Up to 37 million acres of farmland have been lost to urbanization and climate change between 1997 and 2012 alone – that is 3 acres of agricultural land lost per minute and you can expect the numbers to be a lot more jarring for the years leading up to the present. So how does growing and consuming microgreens help with this issue? For starters, growing microgreens requires less water, no pesticides, minimal land/soil, and they also reduce waste. Microgreens are not only cost-efficient but also 40 times more nutritious in vitamin K, C, E, and more. With product designs like Solace, city-dwellers can ‘reap’ the benefits for their health, wallet and do their bit for the planet.

Solace is a scalable and sustainable solution to grow food in small spaces. It has a system that uses wick moisture with a biostrate grow mat and automatic lighting which makes it easy for beginners to start their home gardens. The appliance is also integrated with an intuitive app that guides you through germination, growing and harvesting phases. The circular design increases the functionality of the product by utilizing available space instead of spreading out further. The growing light also serves as a lovely ambient light or night light – the design has a simple yet futuristic aesthetic – a lot like the Dyson circular fan actually. It has a detachable rechargeable battery and I think if it ever goes into production, the team should consider making the battery solar powered so it makes Solace even more sustainable.

Unlike traditional gardens, Solace is mounted on your wall which saves countertop space or the need to have a patio if you want your own microgreens garden. The award-winning design helps you live more sustainably and healthily while embracing the new normal.

Designer: Kennedy Castelli