People think of mulch as something that provides a unifying look to their garden beds, but that’s not the reason you need it. Mulch, when done right, provides an insulating layer that protects your plants from extreme weather, keeps the soil from drying out, and provides nutrition back to your beds as it decomposes. It’s a lot of work to get mulch into place, so it can be frustrating to view it as temporary. But mulch breaks down—it's supposed to. A lot of people complain about their mulch blowing away, but fortunately this is a solvable problem. 

The right way to mulch

The surface of your soil is vulnerable. It is exposed to the sun and can easily dry out. It’s exposed to the wind, which can blow it away if you don’t have plant roots anchoring it. We are now experiencing extreme weather conditions all the time, including heat domes in summer and extreme ice in the winter, all of which wreak havoc on your plants. A healthy layer of three to six inches of mulch can really make a difference.

You want to ensure that this organic material you choose is pulled away from the stems of your plants. (Mulch shouldn’t be up against tree trunks, either.) You want your plants to be planted into the soil, not the mulch, and each plant has a natural place it should be buried up to in the soil, as it comes from the nursery or grows naturally, and the mulch would smother the plants. Pulling the mulch away creates a well around the base of plants, which is perfect for watering. 

Heftier mulch won’t blow away

Big box stores tend to sell bagged, dyed mulch. This mulch has three issues that make it a poor choice: the dye itself, which fades and adds a chemical to your beds; the lack of nutrition in it; and finally, people don't put enough of it down, and a light layer isn’t going to do much. This dyed mulch can look great at first, but again, that’s not the purpose of mulch, and the dye quickly gets bleached out anyway.Sometimes, people put down plastic before the mulch or landscape fabric, and this, too, is unadvised. The plastic will break down; it does not usually suppress weeds as well as you’d think; and it introduces microplastics to your beds. Getting rid of that plastic by taking it back up is a miserable process, too. 

Instead, you want natural material to sit on top of your soil, and you want a hefty amount of it—ideally, three to six inches deep. I like to use wood chips because they have weight to them, create a uniform look, decompose slowly and are spectacular for the soil as they compost. They’re also free—I use ChipDrop to get them yearly and have been using them for 10 years without much issue. You can also use straw (not hay—there’s an important distinction), or leaves. In the fall, rake or blow your leaves into your beds instead of bagging them. Leaf mulch becomes amazing compost while supporting local beneficial insects as a place to nest over winter. Using a heftier amount of mulch, and heftier mulch, means it is less likely to blow away. Even if some of it does, you still have a substantial amount of it. 

You may only think your mulch is blowing away

Mulch, when done right, decomposes in place, enriching the soil. It may be simply that what looks like disappearing mulch is really this process taking place. It can also be that it’s your dyed mulch losing color. You could also be washing the mulch away, if you water overhead instead of watering your plants at the soil line via drip irrigation.

Even if your mulch migrates, while your plant beds are now more exposed, it’s not really a problem for the places the mulch migrates to. It should just break down there, as well. The bigger issue is that your beds are left exposed to the elements and you lose the benefit. 

How to keep your beds tidier

Curbing or edging your beds can help mulch stay in place and keep your beds looking uniform, whether you use plastic or metal or bricks.  If you have a well-planted garden, the wind should be screened by your landscaping, as you want a healthy mix of understory, shrubs and then a canopy layer of trees. If you experience enough wind to be a problem for your mulch, you might consider that your landscaping has left your plants too exposed and introduce more of these layers. You can also consider ground cover, which is, hands down, the best way to reduce erosion, since it introduces roots to anchor the soil. I am reluctant to mention mulch glue, because I think it’s unnecessary, but there usually isn’t anything problematic in the glue itself. It’s a mix of bark dust and other wood products that are heated into a sticky adhesive you can spray onto your mulch to keep it in place. However, I fear it prevents the mulch from doing the thing we ask of it, which is to break down into compost. 

Mulch isn't permanent

Mulch is a to-do item you should address yearly. Choose the right kind of mulch, and make sure you are applying enough of it in the right places, and replace it when you see it disappearing. Occasionally, take a peek at the soil below your composting mulch. It’s likely to be a healthy layer of humus full of happy worms and mycorrhizae.

Even as we move into gardening seasoning outside, I am keeping all of my indoor gardens going through the summer months. I've been surprised by how handy it is to have these gardens nearby and how it leads to me using crops like fresh herbs more often. The side effect I didn't expect was how much I enjoy having the actual plants and greenery around in my bedroom and living room: The gardens produce a calming tickling-water sound, like a creek, and I love the smell of the plants. If gardening outside isn't for you, you might find one of these indoor gardening sets that require almost no skill to be just the trick.

These commercial sets include everything you might need, from the seed cups and growing medium, to the lights, and the use a pump to recirculate the water at regular intervals. Small sets like the Aerogarden Harvest or Letpot can sit on a countertop and large ones like Rise need their own space on the floor. Here are the tips I’ve developed to use these gardens more effectively. 

Buy a level

Hydroponic gardens work by keeping the roots of the plant constantly hydrated either in a pool of recirculating water or by routinely “watering” them via a pump. For this to work effectively, the entire system has to be level. Usually, bigger kits like Rise will have leveling feet to help with this, but a system like LettuceGrow doesn’t, so you’ll need shims. You still need to ensure your countertop garden is level. When they’re not, the water will list to one side of the garden, and some roots might not get hydrated. If only one side of your garden is germinating, this might be the cause. 

Grow the right crops

Hydro gardens grow crops in a tight space, with a finite amount of “sunlight” and no soil for roots to steady themselves in. While almost anything will still grow, crops that are going to require a lot of support like squash can’t flourish. Crops with a really long grow period, like pumpkins, also are not ideal for the system, since you’ll need to turn the garden system over before the pumpkin is done and it will grow out of the “sunlight.” Moreover, while smaller and smaller vegetable plants are always being bred (I recently grew actual tomatoes on eight-inch tall plants from Aerogarden), it doesn’t mean they’ll taste good. I’ve been really disappointed by fruit and vegetables grown in hydroponic environments; while they still receive nutrition, sunlight and water, they usually just don’t taste great. So while you can grow almost anything, I’ve found that simply growing herbs or simpler, short crops like peas is the best way to go. 

Learn how to self-pollinate

Since your hydroponic garden won’t be visited by bees to do the work of carrying pollen from plant to plant, you’ll need to do that if you grow any type of fruit or vegetable. I’ve seen many of these gardens advise casually shaking the plants from time to time, but this is disingenuous. To achieve good pollination rates, you need to really vibrate the plants and do it often while there are flowers. The best way I’ve found to do this is with a real vibrator or massage wand and to use a smart automation to have it run for a minute every few hours. I specifically looked for one that plugged in and used a manual switch, rather than a button to be powered on each time. This way, I could leave the want plugged in and on, and just set an automation for the outlet it was plugged into. I just left it set on top of the garden, but you could also tape it to the back. As long as it’s attached in some way to the garden, it will vibrate it enough that the pollen will be freed and form a cloud of yellow dust that will settle onto the blossoms and pollinate them. 

Grow any seed you’d like

Most companies that make hydroponic gardens sell seed packs or starts for those gardens, and they’re quite expensive. But the gardens provide everything a plant needs to grow: sunlight, nutrition, and water. You can always purchase aftermarket pods and growing medium and plant your own seeds. There’s nothing particularly special about the lettuce or herb seeds they’re using, and you likely have seeds or can purchase a packet of them, cheaply. While small “patio” vegetables are bred specifically for these purposes, you can usually purchase similar varieties online (although, again, growing them is mostly for sport as they don’t taste great). 

Be vigilant about pest prevention

Plants will attract pests like aphids and gnats on their own with little work. Hydro gardens seem to worsen the problem, so you have to be proactive. Always ensure there is no standing water around, from a leaking unit or when you add water to the unit. Using traps nearby is a good idea—I like the Zevo flying insect traps that use UV light to attract the insects. You can consider adding nasturtium flowers to your garden—not in abundance, but in one of the growing pods since they work to “trap” aphids. The aphids are attracted to the nasturtium, and just hang out on it, avoiding your other plants; you just leave the nasturtium to do it’s work. 

The secret sauce, for me, has been using smaller gardens for growing herbs, which I use consistently, making sure I am hacking the plants back on a regular basis to keep them from bolting. For larger gardens, I grow greens like lettuce, celery, celery, chard, and spinach. Using small, compact plants like these means that nothing is crowded out, there’s no fruit to be disappointed by or that will take too much time, and you ultimately end up pretty satisfied with the experience. 

May is when all the work you’ve put into your yard over the years starts showing. Suddenly, what looked sparse and barren just five weeks ago is filled out with greenery and signs of life. May is a heavy work month in the garden, but if you put in the time and effort now, you’ll have a summer full of blooms and fruit. 

General garden maintenance

Watering systems may have taken a hit during winter storms, so now is the time to ensure that the controller is working, that none of your underwater pipes have burst, and that all your above-ground connections are intact. Go zone by zone and test each of your lines. If you use a hose bib setup, get it up and running, and then check it. It can still be raining in many parts of the country, but very soon you’ll need your irrigation in place. For plants growing in full sun, you want to aim for one to two inches of water a week by watering in the morning.  

Your established beds can benefit from a layer of compost, which will act as a general fertilizer, as well as create volume back in your beds if they’ve experienced erosion during the winter. Follow the compost with a layer of mulch. Spending this time spreading the compost and mulch will give you the opportunity to size up each part of your garden, so take notes as you go for which areas need weeding, are experiencing pests, or have plants that look like they might not have survived the winter. 

Shrubs, trees and vines

A number of shrubs go through blooming cycles in spring, like lilac and forsythia. Once they’ve bloomed, you can prune them back, and in some cases, like lilac, this may trigger a second bloom later in the season. In either case, it will take one fall task off your list and keep the garden looking tidier. 

This is a good time to plant new woody shrubs and trees—the weather is mild, and the ground should be soft from the rains. For your existing trees, make sure you feed them with a fertilizer that is appropriate for them this month. Your garden center can help identify which fertilizer is best for the trees you have. Each of these trees will be creating shoots this month, and you should prune them back as necessary to maintain the shape of the tree and to keep fruit to an amount the tree can reasonably support. Ensure you are only using clean pruners or loppers—carry diluted bleach or Lysol with you in a spray bottle while outside. 

Climbing perennial vines like clematis, roses and honeysuckle should be coming out of their slumber at this point, and you’ll want to ensure you’re supporting them by tying them loosely to their trellises as they climb. 

Annual flowers

Garden centers should be full of annuals at this point of the year, including petunias, lobelia, marigolds and begonias. Annuals are a bit more tender than perennials, so you want to wait until you are past the risk of freezing to plant. Annuals can fill an area with color in the space and time between perennials blooming, and are ideal for window boxes and planters, where it might be hard for annuals to survive the winter. Most hanging baskets have annuals for the same reason—they’re just too exposed for perennials or anything else to survive winter. You can plant your baskets now, but you might need to wait until it’s warm enough for them to come out; you want to focus on overnight temperatures and soil temperature to determine the right date. 

Perennial flowers

Most people will have tulips in bloom or just completed at this point—remember not to cut them down after bloom. Tulips need their leaves in order to come back next year, so let them compost in place. Once the foliage has yellowed, it’s ok to divide or move the bulbs. Once the tulip has bloomed, it’s a great time for a bulb fertilizer, so they’ll be strong next year. You can also plant summer bulbs like dahlias and cannas now, if the risk of frost is gone.

If you didn’t get new perennials planted in April, you can still do so now, or divide the perennials you have. The ground should be very workable now, and you may be noticing which plants are ready to be divided as you move about the garden. If you’d like them to bloom this summer, you’ll want to get this task done in May. As you plant, ensure you’re using slow release fertilizer in the ground where you plant. 

Your roses need a spring fertilizer and might need some shaping at this point or help attaching to the trellis. Look for signs of stress or pests and ensure you’re treating them with appropriate treatments. Your garden center can help. 

Vegetables

Many zones across the country will start putting vegetables in the ground sometime in May, depending on the soil temperature, overnight temperature and the risk of frost. Begin hardening off vegetables like tomatoes, pepper and eggplant as appropriate.

Perennial vegetables like asparagus and artichokes should be active now. Remember to harvest asparagus daily, taking only spears that are larger than your pinky. Once spears become thinner, it’s time to leave the plant alone for next year. Watch your artichoke plants for ants or aphid infestations, which may be sprayed off, but will return without further treatment like neem oil or nearby trap flowers like nasturtiums. Both asparagus beds and artichokes will benefit from a spring fertilizer. 

By mid to late May, almost all regions should be planting their warn weather crops. Tomatoes, eggplant and peppers, but also beans, corn, cucumber and everything else. Your beans and corn can be direct seeded, as can melon, pumpkin and both winter and summer squash, but using starts will give you a leg up for the summer.

If you planted potatoes in the spring, it’s likely time to hill up earth around the sprouts. 

Thin out your strawberry beds of runners. Strawberry plants can either focus their energy on producing these runners or on fruit, but aren’t very good at doing both. Each spring the beds much be thinned to create better and larger fruit. You can give away the runners or plant them elsewhere.

Pest control

Reduce snail and slug populations by putting out traps and going on regular evening hunts. Doing this now, as the rains cease, will greatly reduce problems later this summer. Hang pheromone traps in your fruit trees now, which will control pests this summer and protect your fruit. 

May is moving day for young seedlings. I am constantly moving trays of flowers and vegetables from the growing room to my popup greenhouse for more space, or hardening them off outside to get ready to go into the ground. As they move out, they make room to seed-start the next group of flowers and vegetables for the mid summer. If you catch me outside, there’s a good chance there are a few seed packs in my pocket to remind me to put something in the ground, too. Summer is just starting, but there are lots of seeds to be planted right now, either inside to grow into starts, or direct seeding outside.

Lawns

Take advantage of the last of the rains to help germinate lawn seed. If your lawn has patches that need some reseeding or you want to plant a whole summer lawn, work with your local garden center to find the right seed. Germination is really dependent on water, so you want to balance last frost date and warm enough weather for the seed you plant with there being enough rain so you’re not watering constantly. 

It’s not just traditional lawns, either. If you’ve got an eco lawn or clover lawn, you can flesh out the area by adding red and strawberry clover seed for the summer as well as English daisy seed. Ideally, you’re not creating a monoculture of one kind of seed, so other low lying flowers can be added in. 

Annual flowers

In most parts of the U.S., you’ll start to get enough sunshine this month to direct seed outside, which just means you’ll plant the seeds in the soil, rather than try to grow seedlings inside to plant outside later. If you’re going to try to direct-seed annuals like wildflowers, they can start going in the ground as soon as you’ve reasonably passed the risk of frost. Pay attention to the packet for instructions as to depth of seeds—many seeds can not germinate by simply being sprinkled on top of the soil; they need cover of soil. Your sunflower seeds, for instance, need a depth of an inch or so. A good basic rule is that seeds need to be planted as deep as their size. So tiny seeds like celosia and poppy are ok to be sowed on the surface, but marigolds and zinnia must be planted about half an inch deep. If you want to scatter the seeds to get a more natural look rather than poke holes for the seeds, scratch up an area so there’s soil contact for the seeds, then scatter them and cover them by sprinkling soil on top and patting it down. Finish by watering. 

Remember that summer is finite, so if you haven’t planted annual flower starts and you want to direct seed, you’ll want to do so before the end of May—although you may succession-seed another round of flowers later this summer, like zinnias or sunflowers. 

Vegetables

All of your tender summer vegetables benefit from going into your garden as seedlings, rather than seeds. The summer is just so short that that you want to ensure you have enough runway to grow tomatoes and eggplants and peppers before it’s over. Generally, most people either grow or buy starts for the rest of their garden as well, including pumpkins, corn, cucumbers, squash, and beans. But you can direct-seed these, and now is the time to do so. Direct-seeding has some upsides: You don’t need room inside to grow them or soil and pots. The downside is that seeds outside are a little more vulnerable to squirrels and birds, and those young shoots are vulnerable to snails, slugs, and squirrels. All this to say: You should over-plant (and remember to follow the seeding instructions on the seed package for the appropriate depth of different types of seeds). 

Be sure that you take advantage of the last spring rain to germinate additional rounds of carrots. Since they need constant moisture during germination, the rain can carry the load here. This time of year, I leave the radish, lettuce, green onion, beet, and kohlrabi seeds outside in a protected spot so I’ll remember to seed them once a week. You don’t need to put out a packet’s worth each week, just the number that you’ll eat. It helps to mark rows as you go so you don’t plant in a spot you’ve already seeded. 

My favorite tip for having a summers’ worth of lettuce is to direct seed a long, low trough planter of lettuce, but you can just pick a corner of a planting bed. Dump the whole packet of seeds in and be sure to mix it with the top layer of soil so it’s distributed evenly. Water the packet and as it germinates, you'll have a planter packed with lettuce. But if it's too packed, it won’t grow much, so each week, I grab a scoop from the end of the planter, separate those seedlings, and plant them out in the garden beds. The planter acts as a holding space for lettuce most of the summer, and each week I pluck out a few to plant. 

Succession planting

Back inside, it’s time to get your mid-summer starts planted. This can be more lettuce if you prefer to grow it inside, but also chard, brassicas, beans, cucumbers, and mid-summer flowers. Again, you can direct seed these or grow them inside, which is a far more controlled environment.

The U.S. is a wildly diverse landscape. Consider how different the northern landscapes of Michigan and Minnesota are from the deserts of Texas and New Mexico, or the dense forests of the Northeast or Northwest. While it’s common sense that these different landscapes wouldn’t support the same plant life, it doesn’t stop people from trying to grow cactus in the forest. Even within a similar landscape, say, across the Southwest, there are variances in what grew natively before we began introducing new species. The landscape was made to support those native species; in fact, the entire ecosystem revolved around those native plants. They attracted the local pollinators and fed the local wildlife—the digested plants become seeds and the cycle starts again. There’s been a movement in the last twenty years to refocus our landscaping efforts on native plants to help local pollinators and wildlife, preserve water, and keep invasive plants from taking over environments. 

What are native plants?

Generally, native species are the plants that lived in a region before European settlement. The species proliferated at that point because the environment supported it; these were the plants that flourished under the conditions of the region. Even after all the remediation we’ve done to the environment, when the land is cleared due to natural or man-made conditions like wildfire or road construction, the plants you first see come back are the native plants. If plants are tuned to the environmental conditions, they require less support, like additional water or sheltering. Think about the cactus growing in the forest: It has to come inside for the winter, and needs additional light and heat, and might even require a dehumidifier. But a native fern requires none of those supports and would do just fine outside during the winter. In the Sonoran desert, the opposite is true: The cactus has all it needs to survive the winter and summer outside on its own, but a fern would not survive unless it had constant additional shade and water. 

Why native plants are important

It’s not just that native plants are tuned to the local environment. Local wildlife is tuned and accustomed to those native plants, too. They provide nectar for birds and bees, butterflies, bats—all your local pollinators. More pollination means more fruit production, which supports larger wildlife populations. 

As above, native plants need less intervention, which includes less fertilizers and pesticides, which results in less toxins introduced into our water table and environment, and they use less resources like water. They’re better suited to the soil, so they prevent erosion. They don’t require mowing, so they are responsible for less pollution. 

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How to find native plants in your area

Naturally, Googling is a great first step to learning more about the native species in your area. The National Wildlife Federation offers a Wildlife Habitat Certification program, which is supported by volunteers. Certification is a multi-step process that starts with someone coming to evaluate your yard. The goal of certification (aside from a placard you can put in your yard) is to pass a variety of checks regarding how your yard is planted and how you use resources. A $20 donation covers the entire process, but even if you're not going to pursue certification, the evaluation will leave you with a number of suggestions on how to improve how your yard supports local wildlife. In addition to lists of local native plants, the NWF often has discounts with local purveyors to help you purchase plants; it also offers a tool to find local native species for your area. 

While I wish all nurseries had native plants, I’ve found some nurseries specialize in doing so, and you can call around to find them. There are also resource sites like Home Grown National Park that can help locate nurseries that support native plant sales. 

Once you know what your local natives are, you can resource them yourself through plant swaps and sales in local gardening groups, which proliferate on Facebook if you search for your area and the word “gardening.” This is the perfect time of year, since many communities support local plant sales and swaps at the beginning of summer. 

For a long time, I didn’t think about natives because, well, I like tulips. I liked my lemon tree that I toted inside and out every season. I wanted to grow whatever I felt like. In my mind, I’d decided native plants were boring and unlikely to be as visually interesting as what I was growing. Then I started reading what was native in my area and was surprised by how many plants I was already growing because they were so pretty: yarrow, goldenrod, lupine and lilies. When I finally had my yard evaluated for certification, the suggestions helped make areas come together that I’d previously struggled with because I stopped fighting the landscape. Natives quickly took over because they were suited to the area.

Robot lawn mower designs vary wildly, as they're optimized for different benefits, and for every feature, a weakness is exposed. Light and fast robots are easy to turn over. Heavy robots are slow and get stuck. Every single robot lawn mower I test seems to be built differently, optimized for stability or tight turns or longevity or agility, but never all of the above. In this way, robot lawnmowers are very different from robot vacuums—it’s less about which is the best robot, and more about what robot is best for your yard. The Segway Navimow  i110n ($1299, but the smaller model is $979.99) is a useful little bot with an appealing design, tight turn radius, small footprint and relatively easy-to-use app. It struggles with irregular landscapes and doesn’t get as close to obstacles as I would like. Still, if you’re willing to do a little yard amendment to make it work, the Navimow is a good choice for a mid-priced robot lawn mower. 

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Easy to put together

The Navimow comes mostly put together right out of the box. Unlike the Mammotion Luba 2, this is not a low-to-the-ground bot; it's rather boxy. The Navimow features two large front wheels and then smaller wheels that look like office-chair casters. The garage, an additional purchase that I recommend (it protects your investment from the elements as well as thieves), was also quick to come together. The most confusing part was the navigation tower, which you install atop an included pole. You can, alternatively, mount it on your home, and the instructions weren’t helpful distinguishing the parts of the house mount and the pole from one another. The dock, mower, garage and GPS tower are all relatively lightweight.

Segway goes to great lengths in their app and documents to offer direction on how to install the tower and the bot, because like a number of other bots, the tower and bot always need to be in sight of one another, and the tower also needs to have line of sight to the sky. If you have a front and back yard, you’ll likely need to mount the pole on your home to maintain the line of sight to the bot at all times, which means the bot and tower will be in two different places. There are plenty of cords given to do so, but it’s much, much easier when you can install them both in one place. Once in place, I struggled to pair the Navimow to the app for about 30 minutes—the app just couldn’t find the robot—but eventually it did pair, and the app has been consistent since then. 

Prefers a level lawn

The Navimow sets boundaries in a way I enjoy, like the Mammotion Luba 2. You “walk” the robot around the perimeter, using the remote control in the app to set the boundary. Then the mower goes about mapping everything in that boundary. You can set “no go” zones, but in this yard, the only no go zones were some raised beds that the mower couldn’t possibly harm. You can follow the area the Navimow is mapping in the app in real time, seeing the position and precisely how much space has been covered, a feature I really liked. Almost immediately, though, the Navimow became stuck in a dip in the lawn. It wasn’t a ditch or a sizable hole, but rather a shallow depression, about two feet wide, a few inches deep. The Luba 2 had sailed over sizable ditches, but the design was completely different. Here, the two large wheels and boxiness worked against the bot. For the next few mows, the bot avoided the area as soon as it sensed the depression was still there. It did the same with a slight hill elsewhere in the yard. Again, this wasn’t a dramatic hill, but a slight raise over 18 inches, no more than a little bump. But still, the Navimow decided it was a hazard and avoided it, leaving an obviously un-mowed bump. We shaved down the hill—no more than a single shovel scoop—and then relocated that soil to the depression and leveled it out. The mower then started mowing those areas on the next run, but I was surprised it was bothered by them to begin with. 

No lawn tracks, but predictable cutting

Unlike other bots where you can set the height of the cut lawn in the app, you set it manually on top of the lawnbot itself—which means you’re less likely to adjust it once it is set. The Navimow does a respectable job mowing, dutifully going back and forth in a predictable pattern after first circling the area. Because of the lightness of the robot, I never achieved the lawn lines that so many people aspire to, regardless of how long the grass was beforehand or how short we cut it. Also, the finished lawn, although clearly mowed, did not have the tidy look provided by a heavier mower like the Luba 2. The lawn was always dotted with a few missed pieces of grass here and there. And while an occasional stray piece of grown grass isn’t a big deal, it did affect the final look. 

Improves over time

For the first few weeks, I was unimpressed with how much space the Navimow gave those raised beds. The boxes were sturdy and made of all straight lines, I assumed the bot would bump up against them and cut pretty close. Instead, the Navimow avoided them altogether, leaving an eight- to 10-inch path around them that required some string trimming. But over the next few weeks, the Navimow started closing in on those boxes, becoming more precise. By week six, the was very little space left around the boxes. 

Some features are buried

Navimow's app offers many of the same features as other lawn robots, including scheduling, reports, anti-theft protection and options for conditions under which the mower will go out: rain, darkness, etc. What it did less well than other robots was help create multi-zone maps. Most lawns, I’ve found, are going to require more than one zone. You’d likely make your front and back yards two zones, and connect them, or you might have a strip of lawn between your sidewalk and the street. The addition of new zones is buried in the app, outside of map management. I also struggled to make the connections between zones once I had established them. The mower struggled as well when I asked it to mow multiple zones, using those connections. 

Reliable and trustworthy

That said, there was a lot to like about the Navimow. It was consistent: When I asked it to mow one zone, it did so reliably. Once I solved the gradation problem, the Navimow never got stuck again while mowing a zone, and I was able to send it on scheduled runs without worrying about it over the six weeks of testing. During those six weeks, we never once had to mow manually, although we did clean up the edges with a string trimmer. 

Bottom line: well-priced for smaller spaces

I ran this test at the same time as the Mammotion Luba 2, so it’s easy to compare them. For instance, the Luba does not struggle with difficult terrain, and the Navimow could not possibly have managed the same obstacles as the Luba. But the Navimow can navigate far smaller spaces than the Luba. In spaces the Luba could barely get into, the Navimow zipped in, mowed and got out without tearing it up. While the Navimow doesn’t leave lawn tracks due to the lightness of the body, the wheels also don’t tear up the lawn making tight turns like the Luba did in those spaces. The finished result isn’t as clean-looking, but the lawn was mowed. The Navimow is also less than half the price of the Luba. If you’ve got a lawn under ¼ acre, the Navimow makes a lot of sense. For $1300 or less, you take one household labor off the to-do list, and that amortizes pretty quickly when you consider the time mowing takes or the money you’d pay a service. I do recommend the additional garage; the mower lights up like a light tower at night, and the garage does help mask the lights a bit. I also recommend mounting the GPS tower to your home for best line of sight to the robot at all times, and to make sure your lawn is mostly level. Still, if you’re willing to put in a little work up front, the Segway Navimow i110n is going to get the work done for you.

Most people looking for air purifiers need it for one of two reasons: The first are people who are concerned with occasional threats to air quality from pollution or wildfires. The second are people who are using purifiers as a constant preventative health measure against pollen or viruses like COVID. Which kind of user you are will determine what purifier you end up buying—some purifiers are better at screening for viruses, and some are easier to stow away for occasional use. Mila, one of a new crop of smart purifiers, tries to hedge its bets by having solutions for everyone through different filters, while losing the clinical appearance most purifiers have in favor of a modern design. There were many things I liked about Mila, including how big an area it covered (as big as 950 square feet depending on which filter you choose), and the reporting available in the Mila app. Still, it’s expensive compared to purifiers covering that size range (prices start at $399 and go up depending on which filters you choose). While the Mila worked well, with a lot of traditional purifier companies adding wifi capability to their existing lines of purifiers, I think Mila is best suited for someone who really values the design and is willing to pay extra for it. 

Mila Smart Home Air Purifier

$399.99 at Amazon

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$399.99 at Amazon

A new design

Most consumer air purifiers are small white towers, and they can scale up in size to cover larger areas. Models by Levoit, Medify and BlueAir would all look at home in any medical office. New players in consumer purifiers have tried to move away from that clinical design, and sometimes it doesn’t work well, as with the Dreo model I recently reviewed. But Mila has chosen a modern, squat design that mixes wood with the perforated white plastic you’re used to, with some nice curves to make the purifier look more natural in your home. In losing the “tower,” Mila has a bigger footprint than other purifiers, 12 inches square and 15 inches tall; it could pass as a footstool. The top of the purifier is where the interface lies, and the nice thing about Mila is you can operate it without ever even installing the Mila app. It came ready to go out of the box, unwrap it, plug it in and turn it on. But it would strain the imagination to think you’d pay the premium for a smart purifier and not choose to use that function. Luckily, the Mila app works well. The purifier paired quickly and without problem, and remained paired the entire time I tested the Mila.  

Automagical mode

An aspect of the Mila app I really liked was that by guiding you through basic questions about your home and the occupants, it revealed functions of the purifier you might not have bothered to learn about.  This is the first way that Mila really allows you to customize your experience—through its “modes.”  In essence, you can manually set a power level for purification, or you can allow the Mila to self-determine the power level needed to achieve a pollutant-free room. You might, like I did, wonder why you’d ever choose the former over the latter, and that comes down to the point I made originally: It depends on what kind of user you are. On some higher settings, like all purifiers, the Mila can be loud. It never rose to a level that would prevent a phone call—it’s merely a background white noise. Still, I could see how people could find it annoying enough to only use that kind of power level when necessary due to air quality issues. But if you’re a new parent, or someone who is using the purifier to avoid COVID or allergens, the reassurance of having a setting that readjusts to always keep the room clean is clutch, and unique to the Mila. 

Seven different filter experiences

While most purifiers have a filter you replace every six months, Mila offers seven different kinds of filters, all based on what kind of user you are. A few examples include one for parents, pet owners, allergy sufferers, or someone who’s looking for the highest level of air scrubbing possible. I chose that last one, called the Overreactor. Each filter has different levels of HEPA or additional filters, but they also affect how big an area the purifier really covers, and it’s a big variable. The “Mama to Be” Filter only covers 540 square feet, versus “Big Sneeze,” which covers 950. Replacement filters were also on the high side—as much as $115 for the Overreactor. 

Smart advantages

A smart purifier has a few advantages that are worth considering. The first is that most purifiers recommend you replace filters every six months, but that’s really generic advice. If you’ve been through a period of bad air quality, you may need it replaced sooner; if you only bring it out occasionally, it can go a bit longer and replacing it early is a waste of money. Smart purifiers tell you precisely when to replace a filter based on real-time usage. With the cost of these filters, that feels important. The second advantage is that you can turn the filter on remotely, or use it in automations, using air quality as the trigger. If you’re a new parent, you don’t need the purifier going while you’re in the hospital delivering, but you want to turn it on about an hour before you get home, for instance. 

Performs mostly as promised

In terms of actual performance, I used the Mila in my bedroom, a space well under the 720 square feet the Overreactor covered. I used two air quality sensors to measure the pollutants in the room, and I kept the purifier on “Bubble Boy” mode throughout to test how much mileage I’d get out of the filters and if the Mila could keep its promise of keeping the room 99.97% free of pollutants. During the month I had the Mila, my shedding dog was constantly in the space. I had some light construction done in my closet on one occasion, and we went through two bad air quality index days; on more than a few days, the pollen was off the charts. The AQI (air quality index) in the room dipped as low as 96% on two occasions, but only for an hour, once after the construction and once on a bad pollen day. Otherwise, it remained at 99%. 

Bottom line: Mila works but is still expensive

I like the Mila, particularly the auto mode that just does what’s required to keep the space clean, and I really liked knowing when I’ll need to replace the filters, and being able to turn the whole thing on and off remotely. However, if you’re looking to clean for viruses, other filters screen for smaller particles. The Mila screens down to .03 micron, but Medify and others screen down to .01 micron. Also, the cost of filters and the purifier itself is concerning, particularly when you choose a filter that restricts the square footage covered to 540 square feet. Other filters cover the same area at less than half the price, even smart ones like Levoit.  However, if you’re looking for a highly personalized, highly stylized experience, I have no complaints about the Mila. If it went through a dramatic price reduction, it’d be a rave.

The days of running around desperately searching for an outlet to plug your phone into are mostly over. The reality is that batteries, of all shapes and sizes, have never been more powerful, available, and cheap. In fact, an entire consumer electronics industry has evolved around making sure you always have a battery backup for any situation and even have a way to power back up off the grid. Brands like Jackery, EcoFlow, and SOLIX offer a huge array of battery backup solutions across a massive spectrum of pricing. It can be overwhelming and hard to understand the terms being thrown around, though: What is the difference between a solar generator and a portable power station? Is a whole home backup different? How do you decide how much power backup you need? 

Understanding battery capacity and output

Before talking about specific devices, there are two measurements to understand. The first is how much energy the battery can output at one time. If the max output is 1,000 watts, and your device requires 1,500 watts to run, the battery can’t power on the device no matter how much energy the battery stores. The second is how much power is stored, which is usually expressed in watt hours. If you use less than the maximum output, those watt hours will last longer. If you use the maximum output, they’ll last less. To understand your needs, you have to consider what devices you’ll be powering, find out what kind of power they require, and find a battery with enough output to power that device. Next, you need to consider how long you might need to power it. Your hair dryer or microwave only requires short bursts of use, but your refrigerator will need to be powered continuously, and your CPAP may need eight hours of use. To help you figure out how long a particular power bank will power your device, you can use a calculator.

Power banks vs. power stations

All power stations are also power banks, in that they are just a battery that “banks” energy you can then use to power up devices. However, when people mention power banks, they are usually talking about very small, portable batteries. These are only meant to power your mobile devices like phones and tablets, and can be easily slipped in a purse or briefcase. Power banks generally have USB outlets. When you move up in capacity, you also need to move up in size. While power stations are also still “portable," you’re not tossing them in your purse. They vary in size and weight in accordance with how much energy they store, so a small 240wH power station will be quite light, and a 2,000wH power station will be much heavier and larger. Still, most power stations are designed to be portable since people want to use them for camping and going off grid. These power stations will have USB ports in addition to A/C ports, and in most cases, a few of those ports act as UPS, or uninterruptible power supply. This just means that you can use the power station as an interstitial between your devices and wall power. The wall power will consistently power the battery, and thus the devices. However, if you lose wall power, meaning there’s a power outage or even a surge, the power station will continue to deliver stable power until the battery runs out. 

Power banks to consider:

• Anker Portable Charger, 20,000mAh Power Bank, $31.99

• Jackery Solar Powered Power Bank, 42800mAh, $29.99

Solar generators vs. portable power stations

Most companies that sell power stations also sell “solar generators," which might lead you to believe they are different products. Rather, these are usually power stations that also come with a solar panel. The solar panel is one way to generate energy for the power station, but these stations also generally have input for standard A/C power and power from your car charger, so if you don’t have access to solar, it’s not a problem. Each power station can accept a variable amount of solar panel input at once, so how fast they charge will depend on how many solar panels you are using, as well as how clear the sky is and the panels line-of-sight to the sun. 

Power stations worth buying:

• Goal Zero Yeti 1000 Core Portable Power Station, $649.00

• ECOFLOW Portable Power Station DELTA 2, $629.00

Power stations vs. whole home backup

While portable power stations can vary on output and capacity, the one consistency is the portability. Sure, it’s hard to tote around a thirty pound battery, but it’s still doable. You can, of course, use these backups at home in the case of an outage, but you’d need to plug each item into the power station. That can mean snaking extension cords all over your home, and having to choose which home devices will be prioritized to get power, since you likely have tons of devices plugged into the wall and only so many outlets on your power station. A whole home backup is a large capacity battery, meant to stay in place, that you can directly connect to your electrical panel. When the power goes out, the entire home switches over to this backup via the electrical panel, meaning you don’t have to unplug anything—it will just receive power from the battery instead of the electric company. These systems can be attached to a solar panel system or not, and are generally expandable, meaning that you can add on additional battery units, depending on how much power your home needs. These backups can take different shapes from a unit like the SOLIX f3800, which, though quite heavy, could be moved around the house, or a wall battery that is installed to the side of your home. 

As the power grid becomes less stable and we experience more weather events that cause outages, whether fires or freezes, having battery backup is increasingly important. If you have medical equipment that requires power, or the weather is critical enough you need A/C or heat, these backups can be lifesaving. Having a mix of devices, including power banks, stations and/or a whole home backup, coupled with solar panels create a path to self-sufficiency and security when these outages happen.

For the past six weeks, I’ve been conducting an experiment. At 5 p.m. twice a week, every house on the block has a different robot lawn mower that begins mowing the yard just as everyone in the neighborhood takes their nightly stroll. My neighbors’ willingness to loan me their lawns has been great for testing a variety of robots on a variety of lawns, but it’s also been an amazing social experiment in how people feel about robots. Most people were fascinated, stopping to watch the robots work and ask questions, gathering in little groups to chat on the corner. But they also caused consternation on Nextdoor threads—a few people expressed judgment about the bots, saying they found them elitist and a waste of money and on a few occasions, didn’t mind saying so directly to my neighbors. Still, I was impressed by how, mostly, the robot lawn mowers brought my neighborhood together. It wasn’t just that the spectacle of the robots caused people to talk to each other both in person and online, but by using the robots on more than one lawn, I discovered that you could share a robot lawn mower with neighbors. Here are some other observations I’ve realized. 

Remote control is essential

Robot lawn mowers work in a variety of ways to define boundaries. Some require boundary wire buried around the mowing area and even some wireless lawn mowers still require physical RFID markers (a common tracking system that works similarly to Apple AirTags) that you scan into the app, placed around the yard for landmarks or to create "no-go" zones. While physical markers might be the most accurate way to define your mapped areas, according Scott Porteous, robotics product lead at Husqvarna (one of the oldest companies in the lawn mowing space), I'd add that they’re also a lot of work to install. Wireless lawn mowers using GPS are easier and only require you to walk the robot around the edge of the area once, using your remote control feature in the app; then the robot figures out the interior of that space. You can also use the remote control to move the robot if you need to later, either to new spaces or if it gets stuck. If I was buying a robot lawn mower tomorrow, regardless of price point, I would look for one that uses this method of setup without any physical markers. 

Additional anti-theft tactics need to be used

For the first few weeks, I’d watch the lawnmowers on each run, ensuring they got back to their docks—I worried about the lights on each robot acting as a beacon at night. They each had stickers I made explaining they were worthless once they left the property. I had, I thought, activated anti-theft on all the lawn mowers: I’d toggled the feature on in each app, and I’d even occasionally get a false alert that the Navimow installed across the street had left its boundaries. But I’d peek out the window and see it clearly in its garage, chilling as it charged. Over time, I relaxed. After all, it’s not as if these are toy cars—they’re large and heavy and on someone’s lawn. Then the Luba 2 disappeared. Someone swiped it as it was on a morning mow, right off the lawn of my next door neighbor—and I didn’t get an alert, nor did any camera pick it up.

This is how I came to understand the fallacy of the anti-theft features. While the robots do generally stop working when they leave the property, it appears that the GPS does as well. Most of the robots allow you to install a 4G card, but the reason for that wasn’t explained well in the instructions: It read as a way to simply extend the signal in case wifi on your property wasn’t effective. It turns out, though, that the only way the robots can communicate off property is through LTE; you can't locate them without it. (It turns out many people place an Apple AirTag in the robot to help locate it.)

As soon as we realized the Luba 2 was missing, I opened the app expecting to get a GPS update of where it was, but the app still thought it was located next door. Mammotion's tech support wasn’t much help in either recognizing the urgency of acting quickly or helping find the robot. So, if you’re going to get a robot for your front lawn, take as many additional security measures as possible. Install a camera that covers the whole area, for starters, but also a tracking tag—and install a 4G card just in case. I’d go so far as to test the anti-theft by picking the bot up and taking it outside the boundary, making sure you get notifications and everything is set up correctly. Also, many people dock their robot someplace other than the front of the house, such as a garage or around back. You might have to make sure to open the garage or gate for the robot when it goes to work, which means it’s less autonomous but likely safer. Considering the investment, you can also try to add your robot to your homeowners' or renters' insurance policy. 

Robot lawn mowers work best on uncomplicated lawns

While some bots, like the Luba 2, are exceptional at climbing inclines or obstacles, and some, like the Navimow, can turn on a pin, robot lawn mowers really want flat, level ground to work on. The less obstacles, the better—especially small obstacles like lighting, flagpoles, or shepherds hooks, that require the mower to navigate around a small imprint. Smaller mowers struggle with dips and hills. You’ll likely spend at least a little time amending your yard to make the robot lawn mower work more effectively, whether that’s leveling it out, giving your flower beds more recognizable boundaries, or removing small obstacles like bird-feeder poles. The more open space you have for the robot lawn mower to run, the more effective it will be. 

If you want lawn tracks, get a heavier mower

It is interesting that one of the most prized aspects of lawn-mowing for many people is the lines left in the lawn afterwards. Heavier mowers leave lines, regardless of what powers them, so small, light robots are less likely to leave the imprint while heavier robots, like the Luba, do. Still, due to weight, none of the robots are going to leave as much of an impression as a ride-along mower, or even a walk-behind mower, would.

I've never liked to mow my lawn, so alleviating that chore through a robot was great for me. But choosing the right robot and making your yard more accommodating for the mower is essential—and you have to make sure it is less accessible to would-be thieves. Still, I'm excited for how these robots will evolve over the next few years, the same way robot vacuums have, and I'm happy to have mine doing the work so I don't have to.

Here’s a secret: Gardening isn’t about plants. Plants don’t need us puttering around or deciding where they should live; they do a better job of it on their own. Gardening is about our hopes and expectations: planning a summer yield of tomatoes with nary a bug bite, or a solid hedge of sunflowers that the squirrels won’t use as scaffolding. For inspiration, we check out Instagram accounts of flower gardeners holding impossibly large snapdragon bouquets standing in a flower field, or the kitchen potager out of a Meryl Streep movie where the garden was so perfect, it turns out it was achieved using an entire team of gardeners who glued vegetables in place. Instead of aspiring to an impossible garden standard, I say we embrace chaos gardening as a way to reduce stress and bring fun back to growing things. 

You can't control plants or the weather

The reality is that gardening can get messy. To realize a precise plan you have to be constantly weeding and feeding and pruning and planting, all within the tight confines of the summer season. You can’t control the sun or snow or rain in any given year, nor can you do much about viruses or fungus. If a crop fails, it can feel like personal failure. While gardening has been shown to reduce stress, it can also certainly cause it if you are too rigid in your plans, as many new gardeners are. Chaos gardening suggests that you just start sticking plants into empty spaces and see what happens. 

It helps to know about co-planting and invasives

Before you give in to total chaos, there are some rules you might want to think about. First, some plants coexist better than others. For instance, fennel does not enjoy the company of other plants. Brassicas prefer to stick together, as do nightshades. But within companion planting are wonderful bedfellows: Cucumbers love being with beans, and onions and tomatoes grow spectacularly together. Sweet alyssum and flowering dill benefit the vegetables around them. While thinking too hard about companion planting can be overwhelming, it can be as simple as looking at the empty space where you’re about to plant, say, a cabbage and seeing what’s around it. If there’s an eggplant, plant the cabbage somewhere else. 

You should also know if a particular plant will spread easily, like mint, foxgloves or berry canes, because they can easily take over a space. Invasives like bluebells can seem charming at first, but they’re very, very hard to control once they take root. While herbs like dill and parsley can perennialize, meaning they just spread and come back year to year on their own, they don’t take over a space and crowd out other plants like mint does. You can use plant identification apps to tell you what you’re planting, what’s near it and if it will spread. 

If you keep throwing plants at the ground, some are going to stick

What you plant will always be a mix of perennial and annual plants, meaning that some will come back year to year, and some will likely die after a season. It’s been my personal experience that if you just keep sticking plants into empty spaces, over time spaces feel fuller as the perennials take hold and you’ll find a few plants that should be annuals that perennialize anyway as you’re trying them in different spots. That’s the thing: Plants are excellent at finding the right spot for themselves. 

Chaos gardening creates less vulnerable plants

By spreading plants out across the garden you eliminate monocultures. This means it will be much harder for a crop to get taken out by a pest or virus, because there isn’t one giant target to hit, and the plants are spread out, so problems can’t spread as easily. In fact, spreading the plants out is better for soil health and plant health. An entire bed of peas is great, because peas fix nitrogen, but it doesn’t benefit any other plants, like the corn next door that desperately needs nitrogen. But if you interplant, they can benefit each other. 

Through chaos gardening the landscape takes on a much more interesting texture of different colors and heights and patterns. Around every corner is a new discovery or delight and plants that aren’t doing as well don’t make the same impact. If something dies, tear it out and plant something else, doesn’t matter what it is. 

Parameters can make chaos feel more comfortable

If you still want some control, give areas themes or loose rules. The area in front of my house is strictly for cutting flowers, but there is no order to what kind. Perennial echinacea mixes with annual zinnias and bulbs of every height and texture.  My flower wall along the edge of the property has only one rule: planting is by height, so the tallest plants go at the back. Asparagus and artichokes mix with 16-foot sunflowers and free growing foxgloves and tulips. In the vegetable garden, slow bolting cabbage lives with Egyptian walking onions and shiso, resulting in a show-stopping mix of colors and structure. When the cabbage is done, I yank it out and plant something else that’s around. Each empty space is just an opportunity to grow something new. You can even designate some areas for chaos and some for more orderly planting, if it’s important to you. 

Ultimately, it’s important to remember that gardening, while addictive, is supposed to be relaxing. While formal gardens with clean lines and obvious themes are beautiful, entire teams are required to maintain them. If you can relax a little and embrace a little more chaos, you may find more joy in your garden.

As long as people have been gardening, they’ve been trying to find easier ways to do it all. The first few times you try to grow seeds, you’ll inevitably be bad at it: not enough light, leggy starts, mildewed roots. But eventually you’ll find a system that works. Even so, we’re all looking for ways to make it faster, more efficient and cheaper. I had stumbled upon the trend of snail seeding or seed snails on TikTok and was curious if it was a viable cheat for seed starting. After four weeks, I can say that while seed snails work, they’re not more efficient, cheaper, easier or faster than traditional seed trays. I can’t find a good reason to choose this method over regular methods. 

What are seed snails or snail seeding? 

Seeds need three things to sprout: heat, moisture and a medium like soil to grow in. For home gardeners, it’s pretty simple. You just have to put the seed in some soil, keep it warm on a heat mat, and keep it watered. Some seeds need to be buried deeper than others, some need to go through a period of stratification where they’re exposed to colder temperatures that simulate winter, and seeds germinate at different rates. Cucumbers sprout in days, while snapdragons take weeks to germinate. Still, the process is mostly the same.

Snail rolling gets rid of the seed tray (sort of—more of that in a moment). You just lay out paper towel, roll it up packed with damp soil—an earthen cinnamon roll of sorts—and then stand the roll on its end and plant seeds in the exposed soil, which will look like a spiral. Once seeds have sprouted, you carefully unroll the snail, and pluck your seedlings out and plant them outside. Seems simple enough. 

I was pretty sure this method would work, since it consisted of putting seeds into soil and watering them. The challenge was whether it worked better than traditional methods—specifically regular ol’ seed trays. So I planted one tray of zinnia seeds and a few snail rolls' worth of the same seeds to see what would happen. 

How to set up a snail roll

I used standard, unprinted paper towels, and folded them in half lengthwise, resulting in a double ply length of paper towels about three feet long. Using seed starting mix (which is not the same as potting soil or compost), I ensured the mix was damp enough to hold together when I squeezed it in my hands. I packed it onto the paper towel from edge to edge, flattening it, not unlike making a sushi roll. Here is where you need to use some judgment, because how thick that application of soil is depends on how big the seeds are. Small seeds like marigolds need less thickness than pumpkin seeds, which are quite large. It was clear to me that packing it all the way to the top and bottom edge was folly—the soil was already falling out a bit. Then you start at one end and carefully roll the paper towel onto itself, forming a jelly roll, and keep rolling until the end of the paper. Here’s where this process hits some snags. 

Paper towel is delicate

First, even though the paper towel was doubled up, it still tore, because that is what paper towels are designed to do, and so rolling was frustrating. You could keep going, if the tear happened in the middle of the roll, because subsequent parts of the roll would keep things together. But if it happened at the end of the roll, you were out of luck— the roll fell apart. As you roll, soil falls out, so you lose a lot of it. You want the soil damp enough to stay put, but not so wet the paper towel is destroyed; it’s a delicate balance. You want to keep the thickness of soil consistent, too. At the end of the rolling process,  I was surprised how easy it was to take the entire roll and upend it into a tray. It’s helpful if you do a few, so the rolls hold each other up—a deep tray helps. I used a standard 1020 tray—that's a tray that is 10 inches by 20 inches, comes in many depths and designs, and is incredibly common. While making a roll certainly didn’t take long, it did take longer than filling a seed tray, which takes less than 10 seconds. You just spread soil over the top, tap the tray on a hard surface, top the soil off and wipe off any excess soil. 

Harder to seed

To seed the roll, you insert seeds of your choice into the snail from the top, as it’s standing in the tray. Depending on the kind of seed, you plant it shallower or deeper—the instructions are always on the seed packet. This part wasn’t hard, but it was harder than using a regular seed tray. Generally, as you plant, you go row by row, and since everything is flat, you can see where you’ve seeded and where you haven’t. This was much harder in the messy snail rolls. It was also less efficient. If you’re seeding an entire tray of one kind of seed, then you don’t need a seed chart to understand which seed cell of the tray holds what kind of seed. For instance, an entire tray of pink Benary’s Giant Zinnia—easy. But usually, home gardeners don’t need a whole tray of one seed, so a tray can hold many kinds of seeds: a row of pink zinnias, then a row of green zinnias, red zinnias, yellow, etc. One of my brassica trays will hold 20 different kinds of seeds, and a chart helps me understand what is in each cell. In a snail roll, there is no way to tell what’s what; it’s just all jumbled together. This means you also can’t tell which seeds didn’t sprout, which is much easier in trays—you just see which cells have no sprout in them and then consult the chart to see what failed. In a snail roll you wouldn’t even know something failed to sprout. I also didn’t like how much soil was used in the snail roll process, which was much more than I used for the same number of seeds in a tray. 

Can’t regulate moisture easily

Once the roll is seeded, you have to keep the seeds moist. While you start with damp soil, you have to keep it moist, but not so wet it mildews. There are a few ways to do this—n a traditional tray setup, you’d use a humidity dome, a clear plastic shell over the top. As water evaporates, it condenses on the lid and then falls back down onto the seeds. There’s very little water loss. Eventually, once the seeds sprout, you remove the dome and water the seeds from above with a water mister (they’re too delicate for a watering can) or from below, which means you give the tray the seedlings sit in a shallow amount of water (the soil will suck up the water as it needs it). The snail method doesn’t really allow for a humidity dome since the rolls are so tall, so I loosely tented the snails with plastic wrap after a good misting. I placed the trays onto my heat mat, the snails on one side and the traditional tray on the other side, and just watched. Ten days later, my zinnias in the tray had sprouted consistently, and were well on their way to forming their first true leaves, which is the signal to remove the humidity dome. The snails had sprouted inconsistently, and the paper was growing some mold from the humidity. One snail had collapsed partially. The plastic wasn’t doing much to keep moisture in; I had to water them far more often than the trays. Still, at three weeks, I removed all the plastic and started bottom watering the snails just like the trays. 

Poor germination rates

Because I had kept track of how many seeds were in the rolls and the trays, I could calculate precisely how much loss I had in each. Out of 50 cells in the trays, only two did not germinate. Of the 50 seeds I planted in the snails, 18 seeds did not germinate. We had a clear winner. 

The zinnias in the seed trays could chill in the trays until it was time to plant them, which was weeks off. They need a strong root system to survive transplant shock, and seed trays allow them to build those roots, without those roots getting too tangled with their neighbors’ roots. The snails were deeper than the trays, giving them more vertical space to grow roots, but not as much horizontal space, since the cells of the seed tray were larger. So, I began adding plant foot to the bottom water of both the seed tray and the snails, and gave them another 10 days. While under usual conditions I’d have let them go a few more weeks, for the purpose of the experiment, it was time to see what was going on, root-wise. 

Transplant shock

To pop a seedling out of a seed tray, you just use your finger, from the bottom, to push the seedling up. The roots will be contained in the soil around the seeding, and you can easily transplant it into the ground. For the snail rolls, you have to delicately undo the roll. This proved hard, since roots had grown through the paper. As you unrolled, you tore roots. The roots of each seedling were enmeshed in the roots of all the other seedlings in the roll, which meant you had to carefully pluck apart the roots to do the least damage. The soil, which would have been held onto the seedling by the roots then fell off, mostly, so you were now planting bare root seedlings, which would surely struggle. 

While it’s too soon to tell how each seedling will do over the summer, it’s likely that the seed tray transplants will do better. The snail roll transplants experienced a lot of root shock. Again, while snail rolling clearly works, there wasn’t a single part of the seed starting process where it was easier, cheaper or more efficient than regular old seed trays. While seed trays might cost more than paper towels, they’re reusable, and once you calculate in the cost of extra soil for snail rolling and loss rates of seeds, you come out ahead using seed trays.

Though Mother’s Day is traditionally when tomatoes and other warm weather plants go in the ground for many zones across the U.S., email promotions from all the gardening companies are already talking about fall. Bulb catalogs have started landing in my mailbox, and it’s perfect timing—because, believe it or not, right now, amidst the craziness of getting your summer garden in, is when you need to plan for fall garden tasks.

The blooms you see now were planted in fall

Gardening, I find, is about backtracking. If you want sunflowers in July and they need six weeks to grow, you need to start them in early May. If you want tulips and color next spring, you need to get those bulbs into the ground this fall, and to have the widest selection available to you, you need to shop now. By the time fall rolls around, you’re incredibly unlikely to remember what bulbs you need or what areas to fill in, because they bloomed so long ago. Now, while bulbs are still blooming or have just finished, is the perfect time to take note of what you’ll need, marry it to what’s available for fall planting, and place orders. 

Start record keeping all spring and summer

I’ve advocated for garden journaling multiple ways. I have a well-worn notebook where I jot down observations, plans and garden sketches, but I also keep a visual diary of my garden every week or so. No matter what kind of learner you are, there’s a method out there that will fit you—whether it’s voice notes or making a list. The idea is to take a record of the garden as it changes, so you have notes to refer back to long after the season has changed. Your garden is an always-evolving landscape.

For instance, though there are hundreds of tulips in the ground at my house, we had an unusually hard winter this year and many did not come back. The ice also caused many colored tulips to revert, a process in which tulips that were bred from red or yellow to be wilder colors will go back to standard red and yellow. I’ll be adding and replacing some bulbs this year, but since they’ll have died back by September, having overhead photos of the areas I want to replant, with the bulbs in bloom, is essential. Otherwise, I’ll be flying blind in the fall. Even if I can find the bulbs in the ground, I won’t have any idea what color flowers each one produces without these photos. This process of taking photos to help you plant in fall is really important for blank spaces you want to fill in. While they seem obvious now, they won’t be in fall as they fill in with summer blooms. 

Build in earlier blooms

Spring is when bulbs start to pop up—the irises, tulips, and daffodils. To extend the season longer, begin planting bulbs that bloom earlier, all the way into late winter. There is a dazzling array of crocuses to be planted, across a color spectrum of purple, blue, orange and yellow. Snowdrops may seem pedestrian, but in late winter any sign of life is welcome. Anemone follow shortly thereafter, with flowers that look like low poppies, and then come the parade of daffodils. If daffodils seem too generic, you have to see the new varieties where shades vary from pale pinks to orange, and double-blooming faces have all sorts of distinctive characteristics. Use a bulb blooming calendar to start blooms as early as possible. 

Define a color band for your garden

For a long time I wasn’t deliberate about my color choices and indiscriminately threw flowers in the ground. If you do this, you’ll come to notice that your garden is mostly white, pink and purple flowers. Over the last few years, I’ve developed a rule that white flowers are no longer allowed. But more specifically, I only plant bold colors: orange, red, yellow, purple, blue and magenta. When I choose bulbs, I ensure that they’re within my palette, and I try to ensure they’re distributed in a way that works: an ombre across the front yard, or a solid line of purple and red up the driveway. This can only be achieved by keeping notes year to year as everything blooms. For instance, as much as I love my yard flooding with irises right now, they’re universally purple blooms. I’ll be pulling out about two thirds of them this fall and replacing them with blue, red and yellow irises for more variety. I have made arrangements to trade a few of my pink peonies for yellow and red versions that gardeners nearby have. 

Add planters to help move color across the yard

Bulbs like tulips and peonies tend to come up when the rest of your yard is still sleeping from winter and looks bare. This color helps make the yard look alive, but only where you have bulbs planted. Planters can help fill spaces with color where a planting bed doesn’t exist. Pay attention to the yard now, looking around where a pop of color would help your yard look more alive. Grab a colorful ceramic planter while on sale this summer, and then come this fall, use a lasagna method to plant it with bulbs. 

Bulbs will still be available in the late summer and fall, even if some varieties are sold out. You don’t have to rush right now to place orders. What you do need to do is stop and take a look around every week or two—literally stop and smell the roses. Take pictures and notes, enough reference material for you to go back to in fall, when you are ready to make a plan and place orders. The payoff in spring is worth it.

Spring is a time of high anxiety for gardeners all across the U.S. We’ve spent the winter consuming seed catalogs like porn, stalking garden centers like pervs, and now we are jonesing for one thing: fifty degree soil.

It's not unusual to hit up a garden center in March and see legions of people dressed like abominable snowmen with carts full of tender tomato and pepper plants, and hearing the same refrain from the cashiers at the checkout: “It is still too cold for these plants, they need to stay inside at least until Mothers’ Day.”

Last frost date is the bane of my existence. Credit: Amanda Blum

If you’ve ever checked the back of a seed packet, they all contain one phrase: “before last frost”: Plant six weeks before last frost, direct seed outside after last frost, start inside 12 weeks before last frost. It's enough to make you think last frost is like Tax Day, a set calendar event. But it’s not, and that, friends, is the bane of existence for every gardener out there.

Gardening is a gambler’s game, because we have to hedge bets in February, trying to decide when to plant those seeds with little clue of when spring will break. A late spring is a problem, because plants continue to grow in the greenhouses and there’s just not enough room for them. They are college graduates hanging around too long in the roost; they gotta go somewhere. Last April I had 400 flower seedlings in my living room with no other place to go. They certainly were not going outside; I learned my lesson the year prior when I went to check on the seedlings I’d left outside for the first time and saw a blanket of snow on April 14 that had arrived with no warning.

How to know when it’s time for plants to go outside

Most of the vegetables and flowers we associate with summer—tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, squash, cucumbers, etc.—are tender. They require heat to germinate and to grow. They cannot survive a frost. The seeds won’t even germinate at under 50 degrees, and they really need 60 to germinate in any reasonable amount of time. For seedlings to survive outside, we’re looking for consistent soil temps in the sixties.

“Your father and I love you but we want to know about your plan to move out. Soon.” Credit: Amanda Blum

A soil thermometer is the way to go. While your local gardening group will be abuzz with the news regardless, its good to know your own yard. Different areas of your yard will be ready at different times. Make sure you’re testing at least eight inches deep in your soil. When you’ve got at least a week of 60 degree soil temps, you’re likely safe to plant those seedlings in the ground.

How to extend the greenhouse season if you need to

Your living room floor isn’t ideal. Plants need heat and light and water to thrive. If you’ve run out of room inside, it’s time for more greenhouse space, and the easiest way is a popup greenhouse. I prefer the kind that run low to the ground, because the tall, cheap models don’t do well in wind or at keeping the cold out. Couple this popup with some agribon, and you’re going to keep your seedlings cozy outside until you can start to harden them off.

Credit: Amanda Blum

I add a few layers of agribon or row cover to the top of the greenhouse, and then a sheet of plastic (painters’ plastic is fine). It acts like a blanket, and depending on the agribon rating and how many layers you use, it can really keep the cold out.

How to harden off your plants

These seedlings are soft. Just look at these accommodations:, 80 degree heat, high moisture and lots of TLC. 42nd Street Greenhouse in Salt , Lake , City, , Utah. Credit: Amanda Blum

Your plant babies have grown up in an incubator—a cozy heated mat under them and warm lights overhead in a hot, humid greenhouse with consistent water. Even with sixty degree soil, the outside is going to be a brutal wakeup call to these Goldilock babies, and as a result, your plants can go into shock and become stunted, get diseased easier, or just die. We need to make that transition softer. That process is called “hardening off,” in which we slowly start introducing your plants to the hard cruelties of the real world over the course of a week or so.

Even in the cocoon of safety that is your greenhouse or grow environment, you can prepare your plants for the outside by ensuring the stems are strong. Use fans to lightly circulate air in the greenhouse to promotes stem strength. Run your hands over the seedlings often—it’s good for both of you—and tells the seedlings to get some core strength. Water consistently, but only as much as needed: The most common problem is overwatering. Bottom watering, which is just giving the seedlings a little water in your bottom tray, is ideal. We want the seedlings to be as independent as possible. Give the seedlings as much light as you can, as close as you can to the leaves, so they don’t become leggy.

Now, if you bought plants from the garden center, chances are they’ve been hardened off for you. But if the garden center is still keeping them in a greenhouse or covering them at night, you’ll need to do it.

Day 1: Field trip

Take your seedling trays outside and put them into a shaded space in the middle of the day for a few hours. The shade is really important, because the break from the sun gives the plants a chance to recover from the shock. They’re not really for a zillion kilowatts just yet. Take them out, give them some time to chill in a protected shady space, and then bring them back inside, and remind them to enjoy these last days.

Day 2: Introduction to the big ball of fire

Today, place your seeds someplace outside where they’ll get some sunlight, but not a direct hit, for a few hours. They’re still not ready for primetime, but they need more exposure than yesterday. Then they come back inside for their nightly tuck in.

Day 3: Here comes the sun

Time for the real deal. Credit: Amanda Blum

Today’s the day! We’re going full sun, baby, for a few hours. Make sure your seedlings are hydrated before they go out, but the sunhat is coming off; it’s time to get some Vitamin D. After three to four hours, bring them back in.

Day 4: Suns out, buds out

Back out they go, and into the full exposure; today, let’s leave them out for five to six hours before bringing them back in.

Day 5: School’s out for summer

It’s the first full day off from the nursery, so take your seedlings out first thing and don’t bring them back in until the sun goes down. Tuck them in for the last time, read them a bedtime story about the Little Tomato That Could, and say goodnight.

Day 6: Heigh ho, heigh ho...

Take one last pic with your babies because this morning, they’re being pushed out of the nest. Take them back outside, check on them at sunset, and then leave them outside overnight. Nighttime is when the critters roam around your garden, whether it be slugs, rabbits, squirrels or voles, so elevate them if you can.

Day 7: Independence day

It’s all going down today, as you plant your babies in the ground. Ideally you’ll plant them in the late afternoon, so they can recover from the trauma without the sun blazing overhead. Planting in the morning or height of the day means they’ll be in full sun when they’re most stressed, which isn’t ideal.

While one point of gardening is to be enjoying the great outdoors, using tech doesn’t take anything away from that. In fact, I’d argue it enables being outside, because you don’t have to be tethered to paperwork or books—all you need is on your phone or tablet. Although I had long embraced using spreadsheets for charting what I was planting in seed trays or Adobe Illustrator for mapping my garden beds, I was slower to embracing gardening apps. I had, somewhat naively, waited for “the one,” the app that would do everything, for while I’d happily pay for. What’s happened instead is that I use a variety of apps in small ways for almost every aspect of gardening, depending on what I need.

The best, free way to identify plants

It never fails to amuse me how many friends send me pictures of plants asking me to ID them, because usually, I have no idea what I’m looking at. In my own garden, I figure out what I’m looking at by using a plant ID app, and I benefit from Plantnet weekly. It has rarely disappointed me in being able to identify plants, even from a less-than-stellar picture, and immediately links to information about the plant. You can use it offline, too, so you don't need service. 

ADHD-proof succession planting

Succession planting (or planting crops every few weeks so you have crops ready to harvest at various times instead of all at once) is a test of best intentions. Keeping track of when you should seed, when you should harvest, and then actually following through is a test for anyone, but I really struggle with it and need reminders to stay on track.  While Seedtime is advertised as a planting app to help manage your whole garden, and is incredibly popular, I really just use the succession planning aspect. While you could much of the same result using spreadsheets, Google Calendar and your own research, Seedtime does a lot of the legwork for you, plotting out a customized calendar based on the crops you want to grow. There are paid tiers, but you can remain on a free plan and get a lot of the functionality, including one planting calendar. Paid tiers will net you more functions to use Seedtime as a gardening journal (which is a great idea) and the ability to save more data from your gardens, like yields and germination rates. 

Eliminate crowdscaping

Almost every gardener I know grows or buys too many starts and then packs their beds too full. It’s easy to do when the plants are so small—the beds can look sparse at this point. Apps like Planter help you understand how much space each plant really needs, as they all grow to different sizes, and some grow vertically while others grow horizontally. To really get a sense of what you can pack into a particular bed, this is the app I use to help me come back down to earth and get real about spacing. Like Seedtime, Planter tries to be an app that does everything for your garden, so you can also use the growing calendar, but I think Seedtime does that aspect better, while Planter is better for planning your beds. Planter has plans that start about $1/month, which is great, but you’ll get most of what you need on the free plan. 

Companion planting on the fly

Over time, you can learn what crops benefit from being planted together, and more importantly, which crops can’t be interplanted. While there are great charts to detail this, they’re hard to refer to while out in your garden. Instead, I use the Seed to Spoon app. I can quickly, from the garden, look up a specific vegetable or flower and get data on what to interplant and what to avoid, as well as a bunch of other growing info about a particular plant. There are some other features I like about this app, like the general reminders about what to plant now, or what to plant soon, on the home page, but mostly, I use this app as a reference library for interplanting. Seed to Spoon can be used for free, but you can upgrade for $47 a year to get access to more features, like an AI garden chatbot. 

Take advantage of free online tools

While not an app, Johnny Seeds has a ton of free tools that you should use. I use the seed quantity calculator to figure out how many seeds or starts of a particular plant I should get based on the space I have. There’s also a seed planting scheduler that does many of the calculations for you based on frost dates. Take time to peruse the tool list for planning, growing and harvesting. Gardenate is a free online tool that will tell you what to grow in your zip code right now, and whether to direct sow or plant starts. 

Most Americans have some sort of home security system in place—usually a series of connected cameras. Now, there are a number of companies who are starting to sell home security systems that don’t just alert, but fight back. These home-defense systems aim to teach intruders (or your teenager sneaking back in after curfew) one hell of a lesson: by deploying pepper spray, smoke bombs, paintballs, ear-piercing alarms or a “disorienting fog.” 

Disorienting fog

“Security experts understand that it’s extremely difficult to steal without being able to see,” is how MyShield’s public relations representative Morayah Horovitz explains the idea behind their security system. MyShield is an indoor, battery-operated device that can be integrated with existing security systems or used on its own. On detecting motion, it will request a visual confirmation from the homeowner, and once it is received, it will deploy a non-toxic but “disorienting” fog created using a polytechnic composition. You can create a network of MyShield devices that cover your whole home, and is $1300 for just the cost of the device, plus a $40 per month subscription. Essence, the company that makes MyShield, has already sold over a million similar units over the last decade in America and Europe, and claim a high level of success. While it feels a little apocalyptic, some in-home smog was the least extreme of the options available. 

Paintballs

Although it’s pre-market, PaintCam Eve is a fully funded Kickstarter that will begin shipping in 2025. Available in three models, Eve is an AI-enabled smart security camera that can also shoot your eye out with a paintball. Seeing as the AI in the various doorbells I’ve tried still occasionally ID my mailman Steve as a package and routinely think the neighbors' cat is a solicitor at my door, I asked the team at Eve how confident they were about their system. Like MyShield, it turns out none of the reactions are automated. Rather, Eve allows you to create warning zones around your home, where possible threats receive a verbal or audible warning first, while the system alerts the homeowners and they decide whether to engage the paintballs. At least, that’s how it works “in manual mode," as a representative for the executive team named Hana explained in an email. Regarding their AI, “the core of this system is a deep learning neural network that has been extensively trained on a vast dataset of images and scenarios. This training includes thousands of examples of different objects, faces, pets, and potential threats.” Basically, it works like all other AI does.

In terms of potential damage, if you’ve ever gone paintballing, you know the balls generally aren’t lethal—but it turns out, they do routinely hurt people, resulting in eye and ear damage and the rare death. While these are “non-lethal paintballs, similar to those used by law enforcement for peaceful deterrence” according to Hana, this brings up a good point: Paintballs, when used by police, incur a higher rate of injury than recreational paintball users because the victim isn’t expecting it. I haven’t broken into a home since I got home late from a concert in 1993, but I am absolutely sure I wasn’t expecting high-speed projectiles. As for pets, there are three models—Eve, Eve+ and Eve Pro—and the latter two “include an advanced Animal Detection feature.” Standard Eve users will have to trust that AI recognizes cats better than my Ring camera. Eve is predicted to start at $2165 when it launches for retail, with an additional subscription at around $38/month. 

Pepper spray (and more)

While Deep Sentinel’s new FlashBang technology will be available to residents in the future, for now it’s only on a case-by-case basis—demand is mostly from businesses. Still, if fog and projectiles aren’t enough for you, perhaps pepper spray, smoke bombs, strobes, and sirens are your flavor. FlashBang itself is part of the security system that Deep Sentinel deploys, and while the company and systems have been around for a while, FlashBang is on the verge of launch, having completed beta testing. The core system relies on AI, with integration for live "guards." FlashBang are deployment devices with encryption and security on board. Deployment of the heftier tactics like smoke and pepper spray require human approval, much like the other products detailed above. David “Selly” Selinger, CEO and Co-founder of Deep Sentinel, assured me that all the medical effects of the tactics used were temporary, and would amount to nothing more than some coughing, nasal and throat irritation, going so far as to mention that the smoke uses food-grade particles. Still, there are many reports that pepper spray and smoke bombs may have greater health effects, particularly on menstrual cycles. FlashBang will start at $2000, but since it is part of a whole security system, there are additional hardware and subscription costs. 

Is it legal?

I asked each company about the legality or liability concerns of having such a system. Eve punted the responsibility to homeowners, saying, “we advise buyers to check their local laws regarding property protection.”  Selinger noted that “all of the FlashBang components are legal in all 50 states.” I checked with two attorneys in different states, Oregon and Arizona, and while laws vary by city, state and county, generally the law in play is the Castle Doctrine, or “Stand Your Ground." The idea is that individuals can use “reasonable force” to protect themselves against an intruder in their home. The courts come into play when you have to interpret what is reasonable, and what constitutes a threat. Additionally,  there’s great variance even in Stand Your Ground laws from state to state, and both lawyers pointed out, it’s hard to argue self-defense if the homeowner isn’t even in the home at the time these security tactics are deployed. 

Is it ethical? 

I asked both Eve and Deep Sentinel to respond to the natural reaction that people might have to the severity of their defense systems. Hana from Eve replied, “For those who haven't experienced the fear of an intruder on their property while their family is home, our system might seem excessive. However, those familiar with that fear understand the necessity of a system designed not to harm the intruder, but to scare and mark them, aiding law enforcement in apprehending them more swiftly.” Selinger echoed the sentiment. “Yes, perhaps it will come off strong, but in a world where criminals are allowed to feel they have the upper hand, I believe people should feel like they don’t have to be victims.”  

Hana raises a good point—these systems just scare people, which isn’t (usually) lethal. If they can deter intruders (and home owners from taking more severe action themselves), perhaps that’s a good thing. The idea that intruders are “marked” by eye burn or smoke burn or paintballs should make it easier to track an intruder down. Still, these feel extreme. And what none of these systems factor in is the probability that "home security" will have a whole new meaning when your neighbors get fed up with the ear-piercing alarms and tactical training ground you’ve created on your property. Even paintballs have nothing on a well-worded HOA letter.

Testing smart grills has raised a philosophical argument over what constitutes a “barbecue”: Must all barbecues involve actual fire (or just heat, like infrared)? Is it assumed all barbecues are also smokers? In the end, it was one specific grill that provided clarity for me around these questions. The Current Model G Dual Zone Smart Grill is decidedly not a barbecue. While it is meant for the outdoors, requiring outdoor-sized real estate, and it will put grill marks on your food, this electric grill is just that—a grill. Simply put, it was like taking a giant George Foreman grill out on the patio. 

While I appreciated the connectivity and size of the grill area, I was not a fan of the flimsy physical build. Though the grill did get quite hot and was highly effective in cooking food, it took longer than a gas grill and about the same amount of time as a charcoal grill. And cleanup was a chore, despite a self-clean function. Ultimately, it just wasn’t worth the price of $999.99 to stand on the patio for the same effect on food as standing over the stove, so even if you are prevented from using gas, charcoal, or real fire on your patio, I’d probably choose a different electric grill. 

It has a modern design, but flimsy build

If it’s been a while since you bought a barbecue or grill, the first thing to know is all grills arrive to you in many pieces and require hours to put together. The Current took two hours for me to build, and required an app for the directions, which isn’t as helpful as a printed manual when you’re  outside in the sun, squinting to see detail from the video on your phone. Still, the directions were clear, and the parts were well-labeled. Some parts of the grill were inexplicably flimsy, though, while others, like the barbecue tools (tongs, spatula) were over-engineered to be sturdier than any barbecue tools I’d ever used before and came with interchangeable rubber grips.

The metal of the grill is held together by screws in most places, but also metal clips, and these proved to be worthless. In particular, the side panels that made up the cabinet underneath the grill refused to stay on. As soon as you’d clip a panel in, the slightest breeze would cause it to slide off again. Great attention was given to creating a sturdy, two-sided staging area for food in the cabinet, which I really liked. However, the entire grill is exceptionally light and even when fully assembled, it didn't feel solid—in fact, merely rolling the grill ten feet from the spot I assembled it caused enough vibration that the grill had lost all of its panels by the time it was in its new spot. 

The grill has a large digital touchscreen that displays the temperature for both sides of the grill. It has 330 inches of cook space, which was the most of any grill I've tried, and the whole point of the Dual Zone is that you can have only one side of the grill on, or use both sides at different temperatures. There’s also a warming grate on the top half of the grill and two temperature probes to monitor your food. The grill has enough ports for two additional probes. 

Other electric grills to consider:

• Char-Broil 22652143 Edge Electric Grill, $584.99

• Char-Broil® Patio Bistro® TRU-Infrared Electric Grill, $199.97

• Weber Pulse 2000 Cart Electric Grill ,$1,068.98

It's hard to pair to the app

The Current Grill app is simple enough, with tabs for recipes and videos on how to use the grill. Through the process of testing products for review, I probably pair five to ten new products a week with my phone, and I struggle to remember ever having as much trouble doing so as I did with the Current Grill. Clearly, I’m not the only one: When you call support (which did answer the phone, even on a Sunday), Bluetooth and wifi problems are #3 in the phone menu.

After a day of troubleshooting, I was able to finally pair the app, but luckily, the grill doesn’t need the app to function. You can just turn it on from the touch screen. The benefits of the app were limited compared to other smart grills. You can’t turn any grills on remotely—that's a safety issue—but other grills offered a lot more functionality, even when the grill was off. The Current won’t let you access any information if the grill isn’t on, and when it is on and connected, you are limited to merely seeing and setting the temperature of the grill and the temperature of any probes that are connected. While the recipe section isn’t infinite, it did include enough recipes for any basic meal you’d throw on a grill. 

It's slow to heat, with a high electrical draw

The Current did leave nice grill marks and did cook food effectively, but without the hallmarks of barbecue like the flavor of fire or smoke. Credit: Amanda Blum

The whole point of this enterprise is to grill food, and in that way, the Current does a decent job. It can get up to temperatures of 700°F degrees on both sides of the grill, which sounded exciting since most electric grills can't achieve that. But even with the lid closed, it took almost 20 minutes to do so. As it is electric, and you’re not gaining any smoke or char effect, you might as well just turn your stovetop on—it’ll take less time to heat a stovetop griddle.

This leads to another issue with the Current: It loses considerable heat with the lid open. Through grilling steak, chicken, corn, salmon, cauliflower, and a pork tenderloin, I observed the same things over and over. If you got the grill very hot, you could get a nice initial sear, so long as you immediately closed the grill top, but if the lid was closed, it would take a long time for the grill to adjust to a lower temperature to cook items through. You could get around this problem by just leaving the grill lid open for a minute, though, because the heat loss was so dramatic that you really couldn’t cook much with the grill lid open. Since the lid is solid metal, this meant you couldn’t see what was happening on the grill top unless you opened it up, at which point the temperature would drop by 150 degrees. All the while, the electrical load the grill is using is not minimal at 1750 watts. Current recommends a dedicated circuit, which I did not have on the patio, and if you also do not have this, expect to have to flip a few circuit breakers through the process. 

Smart barbecues (not electric) to consider:

• Masterbuilt® AutoIgnite™ 545 Digital Charcoal Grill and Smoker, $499

• Kamado Konnected Joe, $1,699

Disappointing self clean

On the left, before self clean; on the right, after. Credit: Amanda Blum

Cleaning any grill is a chore, so I was excited about the self-clean function on the Current grill, which takes thirty minutes. At the end of each grill session, despite pre-seasoning the grill and using a liberal amount of oil, the grill plates would have a lot of stuck-on gunk, but that's true of any grill. Scrubbing with the brushes that worked on other grills didn’t do much with the Current since the cooktop isn't an open grill but a series of wavy metal plates. Sadly, the self-clean function seemed to result in the opposite effect you’d want. The grill somehow looked worse after self-clean, no matter how many times I ran it (see above). Removing the grill plates altogether and scrubbing them inside was the only way to really get them clean.

Bottom line: There are better options

I imagine that someone who buys an electric grill is doing so to avoid messing around with charcoal or an open flame. The food I cooked with the Current certainly turned out fine, and though it lacked the smokiness and char that a flame would give you, the food otherwise compared well to it’s barbecue counterparts—but it was also clear to me that the whole point of barbecuing was that effect the fire and smoke has on food. Still, even at a much lower price, I’d have issues with the build of the Current, which I fear would not withstand a strong windstorm after a long, complicated build.

The connectivity did not provide enough functionality for the pain of getting the connection up. Ultimately, you’re spending almost $1,000 to cook on the patio with less efficiency than your stovetop, for the same effect. If you had to go electric, I’d go with a far less expensive grill, and I might be willing to sacrifice the size of the active cooking space to get more consistent heat.