The surprising thing about pruning is how much volume a small amount of plant produces. Cutting thirty centimetres off eighteen metres of hedge removes about twelve cubic metres of envelope, and the pile that results is around seven — because…
Every seed packet in the world gives its sowing advice the same way: sow six weeks before the last frost. That is excellent advice and almost useless on its own, because nobody’s diary has a week in it. What you…
The modern advice for planting a tree is almost the opposite of what most people do: dig a hole two or three times the width of the root ball and no deeper than the root ball itself. The old practice…
A vegetable plot is not a rectangle you fill; it is beds you can reach into, separated by paths you can work from. Give this the outside dimensions of your plot and it works out how many beds fit, how…
Seed packets give you a spacing figure and leave you to do the geography. This turns a bed measurement into a plant count: how many go along the row, how many rows fit across, and what that leaves you with…
A container’s stated size is its outside volume, and the compost goes in less than all of it. There is a drainage layer at the bottom, there is a gap at the top for watering, and the roots want the…
Fertiliser is sold by weight and recommended by area, and those two numbers never meet on the pack: the back of the bag tells you grams per square metre, and nowhere does it tell you how many bags are in…
Bulbs are planted on a grid, and the grid spacing is the whole design decision. Too wide and you get isolated flowers in a sea of mulch; too close and you get a competitive thicket where none of them reach…
Seed packets quote a sowing rate in grams per square metre and a germination percentage, and neither one tells you how many bags to put in the trolley. This is a sowing planner: pick what you are sowing, give it…
Turf is a perishable product with a delivery window. Order too little and the job stops; order too much and you are shifting a pallet of rotting grass within four days. This draws the lawn, converts the area into the…