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Last line of the article: "For people who are excited about window farming but not so gung-ho about starting from scratch, Riley says her group will soon begin selling window farming kits".

A social web 2.0 webapp where you can share your farming accomplishments, plus you have a leader board to compare yourself to others. Tie-in an iPhone/iPad app to easily update the webapp, and that also doubles as an alarm & reminder to water and care for your plants! The future! Is here!

</parody> Seriously, some hardware gizmo that automates care and data-logging. I can totally see that done with those new cheap programmable MCU/SoC boards, like Arduino.

A lot of the necessary stuff already exists for aquariums. If you search for "aquarium controller", you'll find things like this:

http://www.draquarium.com/

Edit: Even better (phone control, twitter notification, etc):

http://www.tankedcam.com/

Why consume when you can recycle?

I think it's just hydroponics, but DIY with used plastic containers.