Combining gardening and technology, the Snarky Gardener discovered what he wants for Christmas this year.

Gardening with Your Phone with Niwa

With the cooler months coming along, many of us are looking for ways to continue our gardening indoors. While kitchen gardens and indoor gardens have become quite popular in the past few years, what with celebrity chefs like Jamie Oliver advocating starting your own gardens at home for fresher, more nutritious food, many still have difficulty figuring out how to start. A new system, however, aims to take the hassle out of growing food at home, all with the help of a smartphone.

Smartphones have become quite the indispensible tool for many households. The company behind mobile bingo platform Free Bingo Hunter reported that in 2012, there were 1 billion smartphone users across the globe, and that number is expected to double by the end of this year. We’re continuing to find new ways to use our smartphones, and some have even found a way to make it so our smartphone can help us garden in our homes.

It’s all through an invention called the Niwa, an automated home gardening system that only needs a little bit of space in your home, and comes with a smartphone application that can help you monitor and regulate the growth of your plants. The Niwa launched on Kickstarter and successfully raised over $150,000 to bring the concept to life, as well as grow from a simple machine that would let you plant seeds in a controlled environment, to a platform that would help experienced gardeners and budding growers share information and collaborate on projects.

The Niwa’s companion app brings every piece of information you could ever need into the palm of your hands. With information on water levels, sunlight levels, and the like, users of Niwa are promised the ability to see the progress of their plant at every stage of its growth, as well as a deeper understanding of how plants grow. The best part is that the team behind Niwa is also hard at work collaborating with experts in the field to ensure that the system works the way it should, and that anyone who wants to grow plants at home will have access to all the information they could need to make growing their own plants at home a breeze.

The Niwa is almost ready to ship, and you can preorder the item on their website today.