Something was wrong with my strawberry pot before I saw a single bug. The leaves looked chewed at the edges, small notches, almost decorative if you squinted. I figured wind damage. Then the whole plant wilted in a day, despite soil that was still damp underneath. That’s when I dug in and found the roots…
Flies in the garden occupy a wider range than most people assume. The same word covers fruit flies hovering around overripe tomatoes, hoverflies pollinating flowers and consuming aphids, fungus gnats emerging from overwatered containers, and aphid midges whose larvae are among the most efficient natural aphid predators available. Some of these are problems. Some are…
Garlic sits in a container longer than almost anything else you’ll grow. Plant it in fall, and you won’t pull it until early summer – eight or nine months of quiet occupancy while the rest of your rooftop cycles through two or three fast crops. That long season is exactly why figuring out what to…
Eggplant – aubergine in British English, the same plant by any name – faces a pest that most other crops in this guide series don’t: flea beetle. These small, shiny, jumping beetles arrive in spring before most protective measures are in place and create clusters of small round holes in young eggplant leaves. A severe…
The onion’s most useful characteristic as a companion plant is its scent. The volatile sulphur compounds alliums produce continuously through the growing season mask the chemical signals that certain pests use to locate their target crops. Carrot fly finds carrots by following those signals. Onion fly finds onions the same way. Grow them beside each…
Peppers face consistent pest pressure. Aphids find them early in the season. Spider mites move in during hot, dry spells – exactly the conditions a rooftop or south-facing balcony creates through July and August. Thrips damage developing fruit without being immediately visible. The right companion plants address all three, not by eliminating the pressure but…
The root end of a green onion costs nothing to keep. You trim the green tops, set the white root end in a glass of water on the windowsill, and four days later, there are green shoots coming back up. That’s the whole idea behind scrap gardening: using what you’d otherwise throw away to grow…
October is where the planting list gets short and the honesty matters more than usual. For container growers in the Northeast and Midwest, the window is effectively one week – after that, first frost closes the season on anything that needs warm soil to germinate. For the South and coastal West Coast, October is the…
September is the month the rooftop garden changes direction. What you’re growing in September depends on two things at once: what’s still worth keeping from the summer, and what fall crops you can get started before the window closes. These are different questions, and in most regions you have about two weeks where both answers…
August is the month that separates honest gardening advice from optimistic gardening advice. The window is real. It’s just smaller than most guides admit and it varies more by region than any other month in the calendar. A container grower in New Orleans has 90-plus days before first frost. One in upstate New York has…