A reader wrote in last month asking why her basil kept dying even though her balcony gets six hours of direct sun a day. She’d read every sunlight guide she could find, moved her pots twice, and still watched the leaves curl brown by July. The answer had nothing to do with light. Her balcony …

A woman two floors down from me lost an entire tray of seedlings on a Tuesday afternoon. No storm, no warning, just a stretch of ordinary wind that funneled between two buildings and stripped the leaves off everything in about twenty minutes. She’d done everything right by the usual advice: good soil, enough sun, regular …