Gardeners now have more than the Farmers Almanac to help them increase their crop yields or keep track of rain amounts. Technology has begun to plow new ground with gadgets designed to make home gardens more efficient.
The VegiBee is one of these. The idea behind this is to pollinate tomato or other vegetable plants which haven't produced much in the way of fruit. The VegiBee website comes across more like a less than serious infomercial, but according to a story in the New York Times, the inventer has had very good results with it. The only issue I can see is the tediousness of the process which involves holding a vibrating wand next to a tomato blossom so that pollen will fall into a spoon (which comes with the wand). Then the gardener must go to another tomato plant and gently dip its tomato blossoms into the pollen.
That may be fine for someone who only has a few backyard plants, but it would be very time consuming to those who have many. But the VegiBee is only 50 dollars and if you had the money to spare it might be worth trying just to see if the crop yield increased from previous years.
There's also the Rapitest 4-Way Analyzer which measures moisture and pH levels, but also determines whether to add fertilizer and what the sunlight level is in a particular spot in the garden. 30 bucks.
Comments