Am I the only person who usually forgets to drink enough water? Even when I was trying really hard, preparing litre bottles each morning to try and drink more I would just… not drink it. If only there was an app for that – and there is!
Plant Nanny is an app that encourages you to drink water by providing you with an adorable virtual plant to look after. Each cup of water you drink helps your plant baby stay healthy and grow into adulthood. You then get to keep your adult plants ‘outside’ where they happily give you seeds so that you can upgrade to fancier plants later on. Better still, the plant notifies you when it’s thirsty (and you probably are too) so that you don’t forget.
Your choices are limited to three plants at the beginning (unless you buy more seeds with real-life money) but they’re all adorable so that’s not too upsetting. You can tap on the plant pot to change its design and then the baby is yours. After a few days of drinking enough water your plant will level up to a new cute form. Then you have to keep drinking more, growing more levels until finally, after around 40 litres of water, your plant baby becomes an adult. You then get the choice to stick with your current plant or move them outside so you can have a new baby to care for. Don’t worry – you can still visit baby one!
Sound simple enough? It should be but, if you’re anything like me, you will muck up a few times. When your plant is thirsty, it gets this miserable look on its adorable face and a tiny water drop in a speech bubble next to it. The plants ask for around 3 litres of water a day and only really stops being thirsty once you’ve hit 2 litres a day without having any bad days. After too many bad days in a row the plant will start to die and you have one day to drink enough or it shrivels up. There is Water of Life that you can use to bring them back (or just bury them, you heartless git) but eventually you’ll run out and it costs a lot of seeds to buy more.
For beginners, I recommend the Cactus which was by far the plant I had the easiest time not killing. The Devil’s Ivy is the cutest all the way through though so it depends whether you want a baby that’s hard to kill or a baby that makes you melt. Just don’t let them die!
By Kate Stuart