About Pots & Soil
I'm Carsten. I'm not a master gardener — I'm a curious builder who got obsessed with growing food in spaces that weren't supposed to grow food.
This site is what I wish existed when I started. In 2021 I put a Brandywine tomato in a two-gallon pot on a west-facing balcony, watered it when I remembered, and got four fruit and a lot of leaves. Every guide I read that season said the same three things — "use a big pot", "water regularly", "give it plenty of sun" — and none of them told me what "big" meant in gallons, or that the variety on the label had already decided the outcome.
So Pots & Soil is built around the numbers those guides skip: minimum pot size in gallons, the two or three cultivars actually bred for containers, how many hours of sun a thing really needs, and what it looks like when it's going wrong. I grow on a 4×6 balcony, I buy what I recommend, and when something fails I write that down too. Corn in a pot is a Pinterest fantasy. I'd rather say so than pad a word count.
What I'm not
I'm not a horticulturist, and I don't garden from a wheelchair. The accessible gardening pillar exists because nobody else covers it properly, and it's built by reading primary sources — Arthritis Foundation, ADA reach and height guidance, AARP — and by asking people who do garden seated to tell me where I'm wrong. Naming that gap is the only honest way to write it.
How this pays for itself
Affiliate links, mostly Amazon. If you buy through one I earn a small commission and you pay the same price. Nobody pays to appear here, no brand sees a review before it's published, and I've bought every product I've recommended. If that ever changes, it'll say so at the top of the page.
Corrections welcome
If a guide is wrong, tell me and I'll fix it and date the change. Photos of your pots are also very welcome.