# Three plants nobody had to ration > Three ordinary plants rooted in cracked electronics housings lined along a windowsill — a vented case, a broken bracket set beside its pot, a hinged box — growing for no reason but itself. August 22, 2026 · https://justog.club/stories/the-windowsill-garden-in-cracked-housings Three plants, three housings, lined up along a sill. A rectangular case with a ventilation grille down one side. A round canister, its mounting bracket snapped off and left sitting next to it rather than thrown away. A hinged box, lid propped open on its own hinge, a lens-shaped hole in the front where something used to look out. None of it was bought as a planter. All of it holds soil now. ## Why plant something in a cracked electronics housing instead of a proper pot? Because a housing that already failed at its first job is often unreasonably good at a second one. A vented case has drainage built in before anyone drills a single hole. A hinged box has a lid that doubles as a windbreak for a seedling still finding its feet. None of this was designed with a plant in mind — it's designed to keep something dry, or cool, or closed, and all three of those turn out to be exactly what a plant on a windowsill also needs. ## Why does the vented one work better than the other two? Because its whole side is already doing the job a drainage hole does one at a time. A single hole in the bottom of a pot lets water out slowly enough that roots can sit in it for hours. A grille built for airflow lets water out along its whole length at once, which is closer to how soil actually wants to drain — fast, then stop, rather than a slow trickle through one point. The case wasn't designed for this. It just happens to solve the same problem from a different direction. ## What decides which housing gets which plant? Mostly what shape the housing already is, not a plan drawn up in advance. A tall, narrow canister suits something that grows up rather than out. A wide, shallow case suits something that spreads. The bracket left sitting beside the round one, rather than refitted or binned, is the tell that nobody engineered this pairing — the housing arrived broken, the plant went in anyway, and the loose part just stayed where it landed. ## Is it a problem to draw a real product's housing this closely? A specific, identifiable product design belongs to whoever made it, so that's where the question actually lives — and a housing invented for this, with no real manufacturer's name or exact shape attached, sidesteps it entirely rather than answering it. A real device's casing is licensable the same way any product design is, and some makers are happy to have their hardware shown broken and repurposed. But the interesting part of this design was never which company made the case. It's that the case failed, and something grew in it anyway — and an invented housing tells that story without anyone needing to sign off on the shape of it. ## Does the idea hold with more than three, or fewer? Yes — one housing on a narrow sill works as well as a full row, and the mechanism doesn't change with the count. What matters is that each housing still reads as the thing it used to be: keep the grille, the hinge, the bracket, whatever marks it as salvage, rather than smoothing the shape down into a generic pot. The plant is not the interesting part. What it's growing in is. ## Isn't a plant growing out of dead tech a fairly obvious pairing? It would be, if the point were the contrast. It isn't — nothing here is grown to make an argument about old technology or new life. The plants are ordinary, the housings were just lying around, and the pairing happened because a broken case is a decent object to keep soil in, not because anyone wanted the image of one thing growing out of another. It's a quieter version of the same instinct behind [most of what actually gets printed from this world](/stories/cyberpunk-print-design) — an object doing an ordinary job with whatever's on hand, not a scene built to make a point. ## Does it print well? Yes, with the housings carrying most of the detail and the plants staying comparatively plain. Two flattened inks — a forest green for the leaves, a clay red for rust and wear on the metal — hold the whole design together without needing a third colour, which is [the same reasoning behind keeping any print's palette shorter than the reference photo it started from](/stories/limited-palette-prints-better). Render the housings with fine, even stippling rather than a flat fill; that's what reads as old, handled metal rather than a smooth illustrated shape, and it's the detail that survives being three steps away on someone's back. A weathered white or a pale sand base keeps both inks legible and suits a sill in daylight. ## How do I get one made? Describe the sill at [JustOG](/) — how many housings, what kind, and what's growing in each. Pick a direction, drag the crop frame, see it composited on the real garment, and it's made to order and shipped. Designs other people have published are in the [shop](/shop). Nobody's watering rota says any of this has to survive. It's just still there.