The longer pieces
25 guides, in 6 groups, each one pointing back at the entries and the tools it belongs to.
Watering
Holiday watering
Which plants cope with two weeks unwatered, which need a wick or a sitter, and why grouping plants together buys more time than any gadget.
About 6 minutesHow to tell whether a plant actually needs water
The finger, the weight, the leaf and the pot. Four ways to read a plant's thirst, and what overwatering actually is.
About 7 minutesRescuing an overwatered plant
How to tell overwatering from underwatering, how much root damage is recoverable, and the exact rescue steps once compost has stayed wet too long.
About 8 minutesLight
Soil and potting
Choosing a pot
Why a drainage hole is not optional, how much bigger a new pot should be, and which material actually suits which plant.
About 7 minutesFeeding your plants
What N, P and K actually do, how much and how often to feed, the signs of overfeeding, and why most houseplants need none at all in winter.
About 7 minutesRepotting without killing the plant
When a plant really needs a bigger pot, why one size up is the rule, what compost to use, and the three weeks afterwards.
About 8 minutesPests and ailments
The seasons
The house
A lawn through the year
The lawn calendar in one place, first cut to last, timed for both hemispheres rather than offset by six months from a UK original.
About 12 minutesBare, brown and scorched patches
Telling dog urine scorch, drought dormancy and a genuinely dead patch apart, plus an honest look at fairy rings, since they are not all the same problem.
About 11 minutesChoosing a hedge for privacy and screening
Sorting hedging plants by what they are actually for, a fast screen, a clipped edge or a windbreak, rather than by name alone.
About 11 minutesChoosing a plant as a gift
Matching a gift plant to the room and the person who will actually be keeping it alive, rather than to whatever looks best in the shop.
About 9 minutesDwarf or standard, and does it need a partner
Fruit tree size is chosen by rootstock, not variety, and a self-fertile label answers a completely different question from whether it needs a partner tree at all.
About 10 minutesMoss and weeds in the lawn
Why moss and weeds move into a lawn in the first place, and the complete fix rather than the one product that treats only what is showing today.
About 11 minutesPicking and storing the harvest
Curing potatoes properly, storing root vegetables through winter, and what to actually do with more tomatoes than one household can eat fresh.
About 10 minutesPlanting a new hedge
Spacing, soil preparation, bare-root against container stock, and the first year of watering that decides whether a new hedge actually thickens up.
About 10 minutesPlants for the festive season
Christmas cactus, amaryllis and cyclamen through the winter holidays, and why the same plant means a different month depending which hemisphere it is grown in.
About 9 minutesPropagating from cuttings
Water cuttings, leaf cuttings and division: which method suits which plant, how long rooting really takes, and when to pot a cutting on.
About 8 minutesPruning raspberries and blackberries
Summer-fruiting and autumn-fruiting canes need opposite pruning, and cutting the wrong cane at the wrong time is the single most common bramble mistake.
About 10 minutesRenovating a tired lawn
Scarify, aerate, overseed, top-dress, in that order and at the right time of year, for a lawn that is thin and tired rather than beyond saving.
About 12 minutesSix South African houseplants
Bird of paradise, jade, string of pearls, string of hearts, clivia and agapanthus all come from South Africa, and knowing that tells you exactly how to grow them.
About 8 minutesSuccession sowing for a continuous harvest
Sowing little and often, timed by days-to-maturity and frost dates, instead of one large sowing that ripens all at once and is gone within a fortnight.
About 10 minutesTrimming an overgrown hedge back into shape
Which hedging plants regrow from hard, bare old wood and which do not, and the hemisphere-aware timing that decides whether a hard cut recovers well.
About 10 minutesYour plant just arrived
A real week-by-week timeline for a plant that came by post: what transit stress actually looks like, and why the instinct to fix it straight away is usually wrong.
About 10 minutesWhat a guide is for
A plant entry answers a question about one plant. A guide answers a question that is the same for forty of them, and it is a poor use of everybody's time to write the answer forty times. How to tell whether a plant is thirsty, what a light level actually means in a real room, when a pot is genuinely too small, what the little flies in the compost are and where they came from: those belong here, and the entries link to them rather than repeating them.
Each one names the entries it draws on and the tool it goes with, at the foot, so a guide is a way into the journal rather than a dead end. They are dated, because advice that has not been looked at in three years should say so.