Letting my plants email my roommates while I travel

July 24, 2026

I’m traveling soon, so I had my Hermes agent set up a service to email my roommates when my plants need to be watered. Each plant has its own personality and requests watering in its unique voice, including the amount of water it wants, which measuring utensil to use, and a photo of the plant. Most of my plants need to be watered on a once-per-week cadence, so the service collapses them into a single digest when multiple plants need watering on the same day.

Before I handed the work to Hermes, I used Claude Code to spec out the idea and create the initial prompt. Hermes built the service from there. It sends emails through its dedicated Gmail address, and when my roommates respond with what they've watered, it updates accordingly. For example, you can say "already watered everything yesterday except the calathea and the laurel fig," and it'll acknowledge your message, send a reminder in a couple of days for the two you missed, and reset the clock for everything else as of yesterday. Hermes also tries to keep as many plants as possible on the same watering day. If most plants get watered the same day but a couple of them get watered a few days late, the service will request an early watering for those plants the following week, on the same day as the rest of the plants. If a specific plant isn't very moisture-tolerant, the service will skip a watering for that plant until it resyncs with the main once-a-week schedule.