This little ball shaped planter is the current buzz-ball in the blogosphere. Unknowing bloggers are attributing amazing things to it…most of them untrue.
Granted it’s a nice design but it has no intelligence, as many bloggers seem to think. It is not “self-watering” as in all knowing about how much water to give the plant nor does the plant have any intelligence to “drink what it needs”. It is unlikely to cure your black thumb.
Let’s deconstruct it and compare it to a recycled pop bottle planter.
Most people would likely prefer the smart esthetics of the Grobal, but the pop-planter too has a stylish functional design if you make it properly.
Note that the Grobal plant growing chamber curves inward. The pop-planter’s sides are parallel. How are you going to remove a plant after its roots grow and mature in the Grobal?
You will either have to destroy the Grobal or damage the root system of the plant when you go to repot it. Here we have a negative trade off for the eye-catching ball shaped design. It is surely not a good functional design for long-term plant maintenance.
Water feeds up by capillary action in both of them. The Grobal has three capillary “legs”. The pop-planter’s neck is the capillary cone. Both of them will do an efficient job of moving water up from a reservoir.
Both of them are dumb. Neither has any intelligence to turn the water on and off. The Grobal has a slit window to observe the water level. All of the water in the pop-planter is visible. The pop-planter may not be smart but it's visibility feature of both soil moisture and water level will make you a lot smarter, which is what really counts.
Water level is not the important measurement. If you keep the reservoir topped off in either planter the plant will die from lack of oxygen. It will drown. Soil moisture is the all-important measurement.
How will you monitor the soil moisture in a Grobal? The convex design has a further negative in that the soil access area is significantly reduced. All of the soil is visible in the pop-planter. You can see all of the soil and root system through its clear walls.
If I were using a Grobal, I would surely use a scale to measure soil moisture.
If we’re comparing the sustainability and “greenness” of these two planters, it’s no contest. The pop-planter will last as long, probably longer, than the Grobal. It reuses existing plastic that would otherwise end up in the dump or need recycling which costs money.
Aside from a little “sweat equity” on your part, the adaptive reuse of pop bottles is free to you and to the environment. The Grobal will set you back more than $25 to get it in your hands. Seems like no contest to me.