The EasyBloom Blog

Inside of PlantSense, we’ve known for a long time about the partnership we just announced with Black and Decker. We’ve been working getting our combined product ready since December of last year. We’re excited because Black and Decker is an iconic brand, and a great team to work with.

Our partnership doesn’t mean that “EasyBloom” is going away… We will continue to operate the EasyBloom website, develop new features, and support our customers the way that we always have.

We believe that our partnership will bring us to more households. My ultimate goal in starting PlantSense was to transform my idea, in to a household tool - something that everyone simply ‘has’. Our partnership brings my dream one step closer to reality.

Now that we have the perfect partner for the U.S. market. We’re going to be looking at ways to bring our solution to other countries - stay tuned.

Andy loves bragging about his Peace Lily. Since he was on vacation this week, I think I’ll brag about it for him!

Andy’s Peace Lily has humble origins. I bought it at a Home Depot in the summer of 2007, after PlantSense got its first seed money from angel investors. I had been working for PlantSense for a few months as the only paid employee, and Matt, Dave and I had fleshed out the basic algorithms and hardware/software configurations that would become EasyBloom. We had also secured some office space. In true startup style, we were working out of a living room and a two car garage at a house in San Jose! Since we had a system to test and we had a little money, I asked Matt if I could get some plants. I took a copy of Exotic Plant Manual by Alfred Byrd Graf to Home Depot and walked around the nursery for what seemed like hours, carefully selecting twenty or so plants that would encompass the entire environmental-needs spectrum. Andy’s Peace Lily was one.

Here it is back in 2007 at my house in the Oakland Hills. Those three green things in the pot next to it are what we called “ugly duckings.” They were working EasyBloom prototypes before we had the industrial design with the nice white plastic exterior. I was testing out the system for the first time. I think it told me the Peace Lily wasn’t getting enough light!

Fast-forward a year or so, and PlantSense has real office space in San Francisco and a product that is about to hit the market called EasyBloom. I brought most of the plants from my house into the office for testing the final system. About the time EasyBloom hit the shelves, I took it on myself to do some interiorscaping around the office. Andy’s office was plant-less, so I got a nice pot and put the Peace Lily in it for him. The Peace Lily loved his office window and was looking pretty good at this point. His EasyBloom kept him watering properly and made sure his sun and temperature were ok.

This spring we launched the EasyBloom Plus, so Andy’s Peace Lily got another upgrade. Turned out it needed fertilizer! Now Andy was monitoring fertilizer levels along with everything else, and the Peace Lily really responded. We’ve been hearing about it almost every day, but it really speaks for itself. Take a look, it’s quite a specimen.

It’s been pretty special to watch this little guy grow along with the EasyBloom system. It has grown a lot over the last few years, and so have we!

Right now over 32% of our customers are subscribing to our fertilizer service - which is excellent!!! The good news is that it has allowed us to get some interesting information that I would like to share with you. Did you know that almost 70% of your plants are under fertilized! So if you want some good tomatoes this year - you might think about fertilizing a bit more often.

Over fertilizing isn’t such a problem - less than 10% of plants are actually over fertilized.

One of the key elements that we have noticed is the ability of plants to absorb fertilizer. Accessibility is ruled by moisture and pH. Right now if you need a pH reading we recommend you use a third party test device.

So… if you look at what changes in your soil here goes:

1) moisture - changes rapidly.
2) Fertilizer - Changes about every three weeks
3) pH probably once or twice a year it needs to be modified.

Hope that helps.

Matt