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Learn Magistra elilla's Easygoing Natural Urban Gardening Method(™) in 10 Easy Steps

(I can't say "Dr. elilla" cos I dropped off academia so I'll use my Master's to sell gardening content)

(it's a Master's in historic Japanese dialectal tonology, but nobody has to know).

1. Plants need more sun than you think.

2. If you're growing plants indoors, they need *a lot* more sun thank you think.

Indoors is darker than your eyes let you realise. A reliable light meter (ca. 40€ new) is a good tool to undo this intuition and figure out where to place plants. You can find lux requirements for house plants online. Err on the side of too much.

It’s very difficult to give a plant too much sun. Yes this includes the plants that people call “shade plants”. If they have chlorophyl they eat sun, no exceptions. What people call “shade plants” are mostly plants especially sensitive to dryness or heat. And of course if you leave a plant outdoors in full summer sun, it can easily get too hot or dry. However, if the temps are good for your plant and you take care with watering, the plant will likely thrive and grow a lot. It’s not the light killing her.

You can diagnose *actual* too much sun by spots of light-green/white/red/purple/variegation, which appear exactly on the salient parts of the plant where the light hits her the most. This is the plant dropping the clorophyl cos she has had enough in that spot. In this case you can move to the shade. Conversely, excessively dark green is a sign of too little sun; the plant is desperately pumping out all the clorophyl she cans, to try to milk every precious little photon. The plant may also get “necky” and stretch desperately towards the light, or more commonly, die.

3. Let the bacteria, protozoa, nematodes, arthropods and fungi thrive, and they will care for your plants for you.

No pesticides, no fungicides, no herbicides, no chemical fertilisers, no tiling. Ever. These things nuke the rhizosphere, to levels very hard to recover.

Don’t let your pots go bone-dry. Don’t let them fully freeze, either. Prefer the largest pots you can afford, with a dense mix of plants, rather than small monoculture pots; this will sustain larger ecosystems. But even a tiny pot with a single plant can, and should, support a whole lot of microbes.

Don’t clean your garden. Especially in winter, let dry twigs stand and leaves on the ground. These will provide shelter for life and nutrients for next year.

4: Stick A Finger In The Hole, See If It’s Wet. Never let a pot go completely bone-dry. Never let it stay soaking-wet, either. You're aiming for pleasantly moist. There’s all sorts of things that make a pot dry quicker or slower and the only way to know is measuring.

Watering factors

The labour of watering gets easier if you water from the bottom, even more if you use self-watering pots. (people on youtube teach you many methods to DIY those.)

If in doubt *err on the side of too dry*. Too dry will kill the aerobic soil life, but a lot of it can bounce back once water returns. Too wet will drown the aerobic soil life *and* breed anaerobic life—stuff that “smells rotten”—which is mostly incompatible with most plants, and creates rot.

An underwatered plant will flomp melodramatically, but as long as you notice it in time, just add water and she will perk back up happily in a matter of hours. By contrast, an overwatered plant will do all sorts of things that are hard to diagnose—dry, wilt, rot, stilt, yellow etc.—and she’s hard to rescue, sometimes impossible.

5. Grow plants that evolved with the local biome, climate, and insect fauna.

These are much easier to grow, will take care of themselves, flower more, taste better, give you less work, resist pests etc. etc. *and* you’ll be supporting the insects during the insect apocalypse, which also means you support the birds and small mammals, who will in turn spread the plants, etc.

6. Use locally sourced potting mix ingredients to the best of your ability.

Never, ever use peat. That’s the equivalent of burning the Amazon Forest to garden with her ashes. Literally; peatlands are as biodiverse as the Amazon, and as endangered.

7. Use bark or wood mulch as part of your potting mixes.

Compared to the outdoors, pots overselect small microorganisms and underselect fungi strands. Fungi love the wood material, so it helps with the balance. Plus composted wood/bark is a good potting component for other reasons, and it's sustainable.

8. Boost up the soil life with living compost, worm compost tea, protozoa tea, or even commercial bacteria/fungi mixes. You can also try microbe harvesting, Korean-style; pick natural areas that grow the kind of plant you’re trying to grow.

If you have to pick only one thing, buy or grow worm compost, and more than using it directly, use it to make compost tea. This stuff kickstarts your soil life which improves the green quite dramatically; it feels like magic grow potions.

9. Pests mean your plants are too weak, or the supporting soil life network is too weak (the two things are two sides of the same thing). If you want to rescue struggling plants from a pest infestation anyway, use biological control agents; but make sure you change things so that your plants can defend themselves in the future. Your expensive control agents likely won’t stay around after their job is done; but if you do insect-friendly gardening, chances are the biological control agents will come to you for free. (Without any effort on my part, my balcony gets a lot of mayflies, and ladybugs, and centipedes, and spiders—numerous to the point where it attracts spider-eating wasps, too. I even got a diving beetle hunting in the micropond. I have no idea how they arrive up here. Did you know insects can hone in to food sources kilometers away, with a molecule detection system more akin to radiolocation than scent?)

A good proxy of plant strenght is sap sugar%. You can measure this with a brix refractometer (ca. 30€). Over 12% indicates a healthy plant that can create lots of defensive metabolytes (also known to humans as ‘delicious flavours and medicinal aromas’), and provides a lot of material for little gifts to microbe bodyguards (‘root exudates’). Over 6% brix, for example, will allow cellulose walls hard enough to stop aphids and mites.

If you test them, you will find that lots of conventional agriculture/garden plants have way lower sugar content than wild plants or forests, and nowhere near the 12% mark. This is because coloniser agriculture and fertiliser-based gardening make plants chronically ill.

Your plants have to die at some point. When they do, someone ought to eat your plant material. Weak plants being eaten by insects is a feature, not a bug. Well ok it *is* bugs but bugs are good actually. The insects are your cleaning crew.

10. Let go of control.

Don’t rule, steward. Don’t erect walls and banish invaders; gently nudge the environment so that guests can be welcomed while coexisting heathily. Celebrate diversity. Rejoice in the unexpected.

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Recommended resources

Lowenfels/Lewis, “Teaming Up With Microbes”
Elaine Ingham / Soil Food Web video content online
Robin Wall Kimmerer, “Braiding Sweetgrass”, “Gathering Moss”
Online resources on indigenous agroflorestry and restorative agriculture
Local community of native / pollinator / restorative gardening
Nature around you. Observe what they do, how they do it, and who grows where alongside whom. Go to a large flower shop and take note of which flowers attract bees.