Easy Plant Watering: Take the Survey

We can thank young inventors for some of the world’s best inventions. For instance, the popsicle, trampoline and waterskiing were all created by kids under 20. In the plant world, the possibilities abound for great inventions created by young minds.

Recently, I heard from Emma Nowosielski, a high school senior in the School of Business and Entrepreneurship at Cuyahoga Valley Christian Academy, a college-preparatory middle school and high school in Ohio.

Nowosielski and a group of four other students are in the process of developing a product to solve the problem of forgetting to water houseplants. To help them with their invention, they have a short survey about watering that they’d like you to take. You can access the survey here.

One of the top problems indoor gardeners experience is forgetting to water or improper watering. So Nowosielski and her group are on the right track. The idea came out of a summer homework assignment.

“We were assigned the task of logging ‘pain points’ in our Entrepreneurship Journals,” she says. “We were looking for any inconveniences or issues that we experienced throughout the summer, which we wrote down so that we could come back to school in August and develop a product to solve the inconvenience.”

Though this isn’t the only idea the group has come up with for the project, it resonates with Nowosielski, who is an indoor gardener.

“Personally, I love plants. I have a wide variety of houseplants (from a bonsai tree to a basil plant). But I found that I was forgetting to water them regularly according to their needs, due to the busy nature of summer break, so I wrote that in my journal,” she says.

For Nowosielski—who plans to study English/creative writing in college and eventually work in publishing and journalism—“nature, gardening and plants are a hobby and fascination,” she says. “I'm really passionate about finding a solution to the issue of remembering to water them.”

The group is working on inventing a product that can be put in a plant's pot and will automatically water the plant according to its need. The semester-long project will go until mid-December, when the group will present their idea to a panel of investors.

Julie Bawden-Davis is a garden writer and master gardener, who since 1985 has written for publications such as Organic Gardening, The American Gardener, Wildflower, Better Homes and Gardens and The Los Angeles Times. She is the author of 10 books, including Reader’s Digest Flower Gardening, Fairy Gardening, The Strawberry Story Series, and Indoor Gardening the Organic Way, and is the founder of HealthyHouseplants.com. Her backyard is a Certified Wildlife Habitat by the National Wildlife Federation.