About Balcony Harvest

Balcony Harvest is an independent reference site about growing food in containers — grow bags on balconies,

patio pots, and the one sunny window in a small flat. It exists because most planting advice assumes a garden bed

and a climate you can look up, while balcony growers have neither.

How the planting dates are calculated

Every crop in our dataset is stored as four numbers, measured in weeks relative to frost rather than as fixed months:

• weeks before the last frost to start seed indoors
• weeks after the last frost to transplant out
• weeks after the last frost to direct sow
• weeks before the first frost for a fall sowing

We combine those offsets with a typical last and first frost date for each USDA hardiness zone. This is why the same

crop produces a different calendar in zone 5 and zone 8, and why the tool can answer "what do I sow this month"

without a human writing a separate page for every zone.

The result is deterministic: the same inputs always produce the same dates. If a date looks wrong, the offset or the

frost date is wrong, and we can find out which.

What we do not claim

• The dates are averages, not forecasts. Zone boundaries are broad, and your balcony is a microclimate. A pot against a warm wall can run two weeks ahead of the zone table. A pot in a wind channel can run two weeks behind.
• We do not run a laboratory. Variety performance claims come from published growing guides, breeder descriptions, and our own container growing; they are not replicated trials.
• We are not your local extension service. For pest identification and anything involving pesticide use, your county extension office is more accurate and more local than any website.

Editorial standard

• Pot sizes are given as a minimum, in US gallons, because that is what grow bags are sold in.
• Every crop page names the failure modes that actually happen in containers — not generic "pests and diseases" filler.
• We do not publish "best product" rankings. Recommendation pages age badly and are the least useful thing a gardening site can produce.
• Corrections are welcome and get applied to the dataset, which updates every page that uses it.

Corrections

If you are reporting a wrong date, include your zone, the crop, and what your local last-frost date actually was.

That is the fastest way to get a fix into the dataset. A contact address will be listed here once the site is out

of pre-launch.