🌿 Grow a garden you'll love — practical gardening guides, plant care and honest tool reviews

Start with something that forgives a missed watering: pothos, snake plant or spider plant indoors, and radish, lettuce, spinach or bush beans outdoors. All of them grow fast enough that you see progress in weeks, which is what keeps a new gardener going. Our plant finder filters by light, space and difficulty if you want a shortlist for your exact conditions.

Sowing dates depend on your last spring frost and first autumn frost, not on the calendar month. Enter your location in the frost date tool to get both dates, then use the planting calendar to see what to sow, transplant and harvest in each week of your own season.

Yellow leaves are a symptom, not a disease. The four usual causes are overwatering (soggy soil, limp yellow leaves), underwatering (crisp edges), too little light (pale new growth reaching for a window) and a nitrogen shortage (oldest leaves yellow first). Check the soil 5 cm down before you do anything else. The plant doctor walks you through the symptoms and gives you a fix in the right order.

On a schedule is the most common mistake. Water when the top 2-5 cm of soil is dry, then water thoroughly until it runs out of the drainage holes. That interval changes with the season, the pot size and your room. Our watering calculator turns your plant, pot and climate into an actual amount and frequency.

Yes. Upload or take a photo in our free plant identifier and it names the species, then links straight to the care guide for it. Clear, close photos of a single leaf, the flower or the whole plant against a plain background give the most reliable match.

More than most people expect: herbs, salad leaves, chillies, cherry tomatoes, radishes, spring onions and strawberries all crop well in containers. The real limit is light, not space — count how many hours of direct sun the spot gets, then pick to match. What to grow asks for your light, space and month and answers with a specific list.

Full sun means 6 or more hours of direct sunlight a day, part sun or part shade means roughly 3 to 6, and full shade means under 3. Indoors, "bright indirect" is a spot that is bright enough to read in all day but where direct sun never lands on the leaves, and "low light" is several metres from a window or beside a north-facing one.

Plants in the ground with compost added each year usually need little extra feeding. Plants in pots do need it, because watering washes nutrients straight out of the drainage holes: feed every 2 to 4 weeks through the growing season and stop in winter. Our fertiliser calculator converts the NPK number on the bottle into a dose for your pot or bed.

Potting soil, not garden soil — garden soil compacts in a container and suffocates the roots. A dependable all-purpose mix is roughly 60% quality potting compost, 20% perlite or coarse sand for drainage and 20% well-rotted compost or worm castings for nutrition. Succulents and cacti want more grit; ferns want more compost. The soil calculator tells you how many litres a given pot or bed will actually take.

Identify first, then act. Aphids, mealybugs and spider mites all respond to a firm spray of water followed by insecticidal soap or neem, repeated every 5 to 7 days until the cycle is broken. Slugs and snails need a physical barrier or a nightly hand-pick. Isolate anything infested so it does not spread to healthy plants.

Yes. Every guide on the site is free to read, and the whole garden tool set — plant identifier, plant doctor, planting calendar, frost dates, spacing, watering, soil and yield calculators — is free to use. Guides are written and reviewed by Gaurav Pandey, cite their sources, and are updated as growing advice changes.