My relationships with plants are often a bit strained. I manage to drown tomatoes. I wind up mistaking hibiscuses for weeds year after year and either hack them to death myself or pay the neighborhood kid to do it. If you’re a member of the vegetable kingdom, then I’m afraid you and me simply weren’t meant to be.

But it all comes down to communication, right? Why can’t you plants, say, just tell me when you need watering instead of passive aggressively withering on me when you’re thirsty?

Am I being unreasonable? Well, not according to the makers of Botanicalls, the new telecommunications system that enables your plant to send you texts, e-mails or tweets when they need watering.

Of course, your plant’s not actually going to send out tweets — though I can’t imagine their messages would be any more mundane than the average human Twitter user. Botanicalls makes use of an Ethernet-enabled soil probe. According to Science Daily, the probe sends out electrical waves through the soil and the amount of moisture in the soil affects the overall voltage level. TreeHugger has a good graphic of the system here.