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…
June is the month where US gardening advice diverges most. Tell someone in Minneapolis and someone in Houston both to “plant tomatoes now” and you’re giving them the same sentence with completely different outcomes. The Minneapolis grower has a full season opening up in front of them. The Houston grower is managing heat that will…
You’re standing in the garden center, holding three different seed packets, and you have absolutely no idea which one to put back. The woman next to you just loaded an entire flat of something into her cart with the confidence of someone who definitely knows what she’s doing. You do not feel that confidence. That’s…