How to smarten up your garden without spending a cent

[MUSIC] Hi, I'm Andrew Gebhardt for CNET. I'm here with my good friend, Planty. Today I'm gonna teach you how to take care of Planty, with a smart gardening system for free. That's right! I can be told via email when Planty needs water or fertilizer or misting, and get sunlight recommendations, and temperature recommendations, for $0. The way to do that is with Koubachi's app. A couple of weeks ago, I reviewed their Wi-Fi sensor, and said it didn't feel worth it because the app can do just about everything the sensor can do, with just a little bit more setup on your part. [MUSIC] Today, I'm walking you through that setup. [MUSIC] So to start the process, you're gonna to pull up the Koubachi application. You're gonna start by identifying what type of plant you're dealing with. And then, you're ready to begin the process. The first thing you're gonna wanna do here, is go to the info screen. On the info screen, check sunlight and temperature preferences carefully, for your specific plant. Now you go back to the Koubachi home page, pull up this screen, and you can see misting and fertilizer recommendations, just based on your plant preferences. And there, within a couple of minutes, you have misting, fertilizer, sunlight, and temperature, ready to go. The only thing that's missing, watering recommendations. Here's how we're going to do that. You're gonna start by calibrating. To calibrate, you're gonna fully water the plant. Tell the system you've watered the plant, then check back daily, because you want to update the system, once the soil has dried out. After a day passes, time to check on Planty again. We can do that with the pencil test. Place the pencil about an inch into the dirt. And Planty's soil is not dry yet, I'm gonna tell the system that, and then I'll need to check on it tomorrow. So, let me show you exactly how this pencil test works, and how you can use it to tell when the soil is dry. So we're gonna try the moisture test on these three pots, dry, medium, drenched, and we'll see how it works. Dry, and you can see all the dirt falls right off. Medium, and you have clumps sticking to it. When I put it into the drenched one, you can see the pencil's wet. It's got even little pieces of mud sticking to it. So there you go. A quick two second test to let you know how much moisture your plant has, and to give you an indicator of when you need to water again. Once the soil around Planty, looks like that dry soil did, and it's just falling off the pencil, I'm gonna tell the app that the soil is dry. The app is goNNA remember the time frame that it took for your plant to dry out, and it will set a watering schedule for you, and, send you handy-dandy email reminders, when it's time to water next. You now know how to get Koubachi's app to set a schedule for you for moisture, misting, and fertilizer, as well as providing you sunlight and temperature recommendations for free. For CNET, I'm Andrew Gebhardt. [MUSIC]