Manga Farming is an interesting art project from Koshi Kawachi that takes old manga (Japanese comic books) and turns them into potted plants. Because if you didn’t know, old, wet paper helps radish sprouts to grow.

He has several book-plants on display at the Matsuzakaya department store in Nagoya, if you want to drop by and have a look. Hopefully he didn’t use any super-valuable comics by accident.

We’ve seen so many iPhone cases, we didn’t think there could possibly be anything new under the sun. But there is, and under the sun is correct since the Bioserie iPhone Case is made from Bioplastic, which is made from 100% plants.

Now that’s a green iPhone case. The Bioserie iPhone Case will be available in a bunch of colors, including green, blue, black and a few others, and it also has a leaf like design on it.

Imagine that you land on the moon and that you are just minding your own business, collecting rock samples and playing a round of golf, occasionally driving your rover. And you see plant people coming at you wearing spacesuits. Can you imagine the horror?

I can, thanks to these Domsai Terrariums, which make ordinary plants look like astronauts. Each of these Domsai Terrariums are unique since they are hand-cast and the glass bulbs are mouth-blown. That’s also why they are expensive. They’ll cost you $140. If you want the gold one, it will be an additional $360.

Here’s a cool video camera from Hammacher Schlemmer, specifically designed to create a timelapse video of your garden so that you can keep track of your garden’s progress. Pretty neat. You could make your own Discovery Channel type movie.

It features two different capture modes: as close as 20-inches or a 54-inch wide field of view with the capability to take a picture at one of six preset intervals. Anything from every 5 seconds to every 24 hours and it combines them into a single 1280 x 1024 resolution AVI movie file. Nice.

Robot gardeners? Students and researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory have developed robots that actually tend to tomato plants, with no human intervention. The plants have soil sensors and can network with the robots, which is a great way of letting them know when they need water or nutrients. The robots are equipped with watering pumps and robotic arms that are gentle enough to pick cherry tomatoes without bruising them.

And so we enslave the plant kingdom with their new robot overlords. It’s a great way to see how it works out with plants first. If you start seeing a bunch of squished tomatoes, plants blackened and burnt, and greenhouses that look like a hurricane hit them, than we will know what they have in store for us.

It’s the 21st century. Who wants to grow plants in soil? We don’t need to get our hands dirty. You don’t want to soil yourself. That’s why aeroponics is the future. Dirt is history when we can use specially formulated nutrient mists to replace it. This Broto Domestic Greenhouse lets you use aeroponics to grow plants, and it will babysit them too, constantly checking the pH, temperature, nutrients, and humidity to make sure they grow as healthily as possible.

No dirt. Well yeah, soil has been doing a fine job for millions of years, but as humans, it’s our job to find a better way. It’s clean. And dirt isn’t everywhere you know.

Spring is finally upon us and that means that it’s time for some of you to begin murdering plants. Quite by accident of course. I know you would never do it on purpose. A self-watering planter like this one can help. It looks like a fairly typical plant holder, but inside it has a reservoir that stores water and is capable of watering the plants automatically.

The grow chamber draws water from the reservoir when it’s needed. The end result is that your plant lives and you are also not wasting water. You can get them in a variety of colors for $20. In the kit you’ll get soil, plant food and an instruction book. It’s still at your mercy in one sense. You do have to refill the reservoir from time to time.