Not every vegetable that grows well in a pot grows well hanging off a railing or clipped to a wall bracket. A hanging planter has to deal with things a ground-level tub never does — its own weight swinging in the wind, a much shallower root zone, and the fact that whatever drips out the…
A gift guide for the balcony and windowsill gardener in your life, matched to what they actually grow and how much space they have.
A renter-friendly checklist for getting hanging pocket planters and railing boxes through the first frost — what to wrap, bring in, or let go.
Once the balcony gets too cold for most vegetables, the growing doesn’t have to stop — it just has to move. Indoor winter vegetable gardening isn’t a way to replace your summer harvest; it’s a smaller, faster category of crops that genuinely do well on a windowsill or under a small light, so you’re not…
Garlic is one of the few container crops that asks almost nothing of you. You plant it once in fall, mostly ignore it over winter, and dig up a full head in early summer — no succession sowing, no daily watering, no trellising. It’s also one of the most forgiving arguments for growing in pots…
Lettuce is one of the most forgiving things you can grow in a container, and one of the easiest to get wrong in a single way: too many plants in one pot. Crowded lettuce stays small, dries out fast, and bolts (shoots up a flower stalk and turns bitter) weeks earlier than it should. The…
Somewhere around the end of September, a lot of windowsill herb gardens quietly stop growing. The basil that was bushy in August turns pale and leggy, the mint slows to a crawl, and nothing you do with water or fertilizer seems to fix it. It isn’t the care. It’s the light. Days get shorter, the…
First, to be honest about the title: you can’t grow microgreens with no light. What you can do is grow a full tray without any sunlight: on a north-facing counter, in a windowless kitchen, or on a shelf in a dim apartment, using a cheap light instead of the sun. Microgreens are the easiest crop…
Basil, rosemary, and mint are the three herbs almost everyone tries first on a windowsill — and the three most likely to disappoint if you grow them the same way. They don’t want the same pot, the same water, or even quite the same light. Get those differences right and this trio can keep a…
Growing tomatoes in a 5-gallon bucket sounds like a stretch, but it works — as long as you pick a variety bred for containers and give it what a bucket can’t provide on its own. Get those two things right and that same bucket can carry a compact plant through a full season of real…
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