A starter library for first-time urban farmers. Practical, gentle, and built around real constraints: small spaces, modest budgets, and the unglamorous first season.
Second-hand pots from charity shops are almost always a bargain, if you know which types are worth carrying home and which have hidden problems that no amount of cleaning solves.
West-facing balconies get punishing late-afternoon heat that cooks pots and stresses plants. The three-part shading and watering approach that keeps a balcony productive from June through August.
A practical guide to growing snow peas, snap peas and shelling peas in balcony containers, with variety picks, low-cost trellising, and the timing decisions that make the difference between a fair harvest and a good one.
A clear-eyed walkthrough of every common element on a seed packet, with the bits worth reading carefully and the bits you can safely ignore.
A month-by-month calendar for warm-climate urban gardens, including the brutal mid-summer survival month most temperate calendars get wrong.
A month-by-month calendar for cool-climate balcony and small-yard gardens, with realistic sowing dates and the awkward transition months most calendars skip.
Realistic balcony yield estimates by space size and orientation, with weighed crop totals and honest dollar values from three seasons of measurement.
The unspectacular three-season process by which a balcony or small yard becomes genuinely productive. What to add and when, and what to resist.
Drainage problems kill more container plants than drought. A practical look at the symptoms, common causes, and easy afternoon fixes.