Miles Okonkwo 
One season I lost the squash overnight, the brassicas to caterpillars, and most of the seedlings to slugs. This is what actually happened, what I did with my hands instead of a sprayer, and which losses I decided to simply accept.
An eggplant I left on the plant nine days too long taught me that picking early and picking late are two completely different mistakes, and only one of them is recoverable at the stove.
One unreasonably good tomato in July got scraped into a jam jar. Three seasons later: the crops worth saving, the ones I gave up on, the paper towel disaster, and the ten minute test that beats guessing.
One good summer produces more herbs than any household can eat fresh. After composting an embarrassing amount of parsley, I worked out which ways of saving a glut are actually worth the effort.
I read my own lease properly before buying a single pot, which is not how most people start. Here is what I found about drilling, drips, weight, and the fact that everything I plant has to be able to move house with me.
I came home from two nights away to a collapsed basil plant and finally accepted the thing nobody tells you about container growing: the watering is not a chore around the edges of the hobby, it is most of the hobby.
For two seasons I picked herbs the wrong way and wondered why my plants went bald and woody. Cutting properly turned out to be the single biggest change I made, and it costs nothing.
The summer I chased volume, I filled the counter with produce nobody wanted to eat. Here is what I learned about the trade between how much a plant gives you and how good it tastes, and how I split my four beds because of it.
I set my own carrots against supermarket carrots at the kitchen table and lost. Here is my honest accounting of where growing my own makes a real difference at dinner and where it makes none at all.
I stood in a nursery parking lot feeling like a fraud with four tomato plants in a flat. Then I did the arithmetic on my own weekends. What I still start from seed, what I buy, and how I pick a plant in the aisle.