How to Actually Measure the Sun Where You Live
You do not know how much sun your spot gets. You think you do. You have walked past it a hundred times and it felt bright. Feeling bright is not the same as direct sun hitting a leaf, and plants only care about the second one.
Here is the check. Pick the spot. Take a photo of it at 8am, 10am, noon, 2pm, 4pm and 6pm on any clear day. You are not judging brightness. You are looking for one thing: is there a hard shadow edge sitting on that spot, or is there direct sunlight on it. Add up the photos with direct sun. That number is your budget, and everything else you decide comes out of it.
Most people who swear they have a full sun balcony are running four hours. A building across the street, a roof overhang, one tree. That is enough to take a fruiting plant from thriving to sulking. And the number moves. The sun rides higher in summer and lower in winter, so a spot with six hours in July can drop to two by late fall without anything in your yard changing. If you set up in spring based on spring light, you already know why things faded later.
What You Can Grow on Four Hours of Sun
Plants that make a fruit need more light than plants where you eat the leaf. That is the whole rule, and it comes down to energy. Building a tomato is expensive. Building a lettuce leaf is cheap.
- Under 3 hours of direct sun: mint, chives, and honestly not much else outdoors. Be realistic.
- 3 to 4 hours: lettuce, spinach, arugula, parsley, green onions. Leaves, not fruit.
- 4 to 6 hours: the leafy stuff does well, plus bush beans and radishes, and peppers will try but may run small.
- 6 hours and up: tomatoes, peppers, squash, cucumbers, basil. This is where the plants on the front rack at the store actually belong.
If you have four hours and you buy a tomato, you have bought a slow disappointment. It will not die fast. It will grow leggy, flower a little, drop the flowers, and take three months to quit. That is worse than a quick death because you keep pouring time into it.
Ground, Raised Bed, or a Bucket on the Step
A five gallon bucket with holes drilled in the bottom is a garden. Say it out loud so you stop waiting for a yard. One tomato plant per five gallon bucket. Three or four lettuce plants in the same bucket. A pepper is happy in three gallons. That is a working setup for the price of lunch.
Buckets have one real weakness and it is heat. A dark container in direct sun cooks the root ball, and a small container dries out fast enough that a plant you watered at 7am is begging by 4pm on a hot day. Bigger containers buy you forgiveness, because more soil means more water held and more thermal mass. If you are the kind of person who forgets, buy the bigger pot instead of the fancier plant.
Ground is free and it is also a gamble, because you do not know what is under your grass. Run this before you dig a bed: make a hole about a foot deep, fill it with water, let it drain all the way, then fill it again and watch. If the second fill is gone in a couple of hours, you have drainage. If water is still standing that evening, you have clay or compaction, and anything you plant there in a wet week will drown. A raised bed is the answer to that specific problem, not a general upgrade. It costs real money, so only build one if the drainage test tells you to.
Why the Bag Says Potting Mix and Not Soil
Garden soil and potting mix are not two grades of the same product. They are different physics. Roots need oxygen the same way you do. In the ground, worms, root channels, freeze and thaw and a deep column of earth keep air pockets open. None of that exists inside a bucket.
Pack garden soil into a container and every watering drives the fine particles tighter together. Within a few weeks it sets up dense enough that water sheets off the top or sits on it. The roots in there are sitting in a wet airless block. The plant wilts, because drowned roots cannot pull water any better than dry ones can. So you water it again. That is the loop that kills more container plants than every bug in your neighborhood combined.
Potting mix is mostly bark, coir or peat, and perlite, those little white bits people mistake for foam. It is built to hold water and air at the same time. Run the squeeze test on anything before it goes in a pot: wet a handful, squeeze it hard, open your hand. Potting mix crumbles apart when you poke it. Garden soil holds a dense wet ball like clay. If it holds the ball, it belongs in the ground, not in a container.
And drill the hole. A pot with no drainage hole has a permanent swamp in the bottom inch no matter how carefully you water. Several half inch holes in the bottom of a bucket, and a couple low on the sides, is enough. Gravel in the bottom does not replace a hole. It just raises the swamp.
When Full Sun Is the Wrong Advice
The tag on the plant was written for a national audience, and you do not live in a national average. In a hot climate, a plant that gets blasted from noon to 7pm can shut down in July even with plenty of water. Morning sun with afternoon shade often beats the same number of hours taken all afternoon. If you have a choice between an east facing spot and a west facing spot and your summers are brutal, take the east one.
The other thing everybody gets backwards is wilting. A plant drooping at 2pm in full sun is usually not thirsty. It is throttling water loss on purpose because it cannot pull as fast as the heat is taking. Go back out at 7am. If it has stood back up, it is fine and you were about to overwater it. If it is still flat at 7am after a cool night, now you have a real problem, and it is either bone dry or drowning. Stick a finger in two knuckles deep. Dry and dusty means water. Wet and heavy means stop watering and check that the hole is not plugged.
Same goes for the advice to water a little every day. Light daily watering keeps the top inch damp and trains roots to stay shallow where they fry first. Water until it pours out the bottom, then leave it alone until the top couple of inches are dry. Lift the pot occasionally. The weight difference between a watered bucket and a dry one is obvious once you have felt it twice.
What to Do Before You Buy Another Plant
Today, take the six photos. Count your direct sun hours. Write the number on your phone. That number decides everything and it costs you one day and zero dollars.
Then find your frost dates. Search your zip code together with your state's cooperative extension service, or pull the average first and last frost for your area from the National Weather Service. Those two dates are the fence around your growing season, and they are different two hundred miles from you, which is exactly why no article can hand them to you. Write them down next to your sun number.
Now go shopping, and go in that order: sun hours, season, container size, potting mix, plant. Start with a transplant rather than seed for anything that takes a long time to mature, because you are buying weeks of head start and a plant somebody else already kept alive. Grow three things, not ten. Some of them will still die, and that is not a verdict on you. But when a plant that had six hours of sun, a bucket with holes, and real potting mix goes down, you learn something from it. A plant that never had a chance teaches you nothing except that gardening is not for you, which is a damn lie you told yourself with a bag of the wrong dirt.