What to Plant Next What: The Beginner's Companion Planting Chart and Guide for Raised Beds, Containers, Small Gardens

Tomatoes love basil. Carrots love tomatoes. Keep fennel away from everything.You've seen the chart - every gardening site has one, and they all agree, because they're all copying each other. What none of them tells you is which rows have actually been tested, which are just tradition, and which were written for somebody with an acre of ground when everything you grow lives in pots.This book is built around a chart that tells you. Thirty pairings, every row graded on the two things that matter: how well established it is, and whether it still works in a container. Nine of the thirty are proven. Eight are plausible. Eleven are tradition. Two are contested - and the book says so, plainly, row by row.Inside: - The graded chart - grouped from the pairings worth doing to the traditions that quietly cost you a crop, honest about where good sources disagree.- 33 crops, one page each - what's worth planting with your tomatoes, your lettuce, your strawberries, and what isn't. Container guidance on every card.- The six things that actually work - the real mechanisms behind the chart, each with its honest limit.- What breaks in a small space - which pairings survive the move into a pot, which quietly don't, and the adjustments that fix the ones that can be fixed.- Five layouts you can copy - balcony, patio, one 4×8 raised bed, railing planters, and one big container, drawn to real sizes with the pairings built in.No yard required. No acre assumed. And no pretending something works when it doesn't.Written by Clara Bennett - author of Small Space, Big Harvest, Edible Flowers for Small Spaces, and Gardening for Seniors - who grows everything she writes about on a small Pacific Northwest balcony, and who went looking for where the chart on her fridge came from. What she found was interesting enough, and disappointing enough, to be worth a book.If you have a seed order open and fifteen minutes, the chart is in Chapter 3. Turn there first. The rest of the book will still be waiting.