Every garden project starts with the same question, and it is a maths question: how big is this? Then how much soil does that mean, how many plants fit, how much will it actually yield, and is there still time to plant it? The Garden Math Workout is the practice book for all of it — the arithmetic between a plan on paper and food on the table.
Every problem is drawn from a real garden. Every answer is worked out in full, at the end of the chapter it belongs to — not buried in the back of the book. No jargon, and no assumption that you have more than a tape measure and a pencil.
What's inside — 7 chapters, 385 practice problems, every answer worked:
- Area & Square Footage — rectangles, triangles, circles, and the L-shaped bed nobody has a formula for
- Soil, Mulch & Volume — cubic feet and cubic yards, bag counts, and whether bulk really is cheaper
- Spacing, Rows & Plant Counts — row math, the square-foot method, and seeds to buy at your germination rate
- Yields & Harvest Planning — planning backwards from the jars you want, with losses allowed for
- Seasons, Timing & Growing Calendars — frost dates, days to maturity, seed-starting and succession sowing
- Containers, Pots & Small Spaces — pot volume in gallons, wet weight, and what a balcony can carry
- Garden Mental Math & Estimation — the shortcuts that get you through the garden centre without a calculator
Four ways to practise each idea: Standard problems build the mechanic. Word problems put the mechanic into a real garden. Mental-math challenges keep the shortcut sharp for the moment you are holding a bag of soil. "Explain It" prompts make sure you actually understand — not just memorise.
Seven free companion calculators — no sign-up, nothing to install. Every chapter is paired with a free online tool at the companion site: a garden area calculator, a soil and mulch volume sheet with a bags-versus-bulk comparison, a plant spacing and count tool, a harvest yield planner, a growing-season planner that turns two frost dates into a sowing calendar, a container volume and balcony-weight checker, and a mental-math drill. Same math as the book — just faster when you are standing in the nursery. Plus a free printable toolkit with a worksheet for every chapter.
Written for anyone who has ever guessed how many bags of soil to buy. You do not need a maths background. If you can add, subtract, multiply, and divide, you can do every problem in this book — and you will plan next season with a good deal more confidence than last.
Educational, not advisory. This book teaches the arithmetic behind garden planning. It is not horticultural advice, and the balcony-load examples are not a structural assessment. Frost dates and yield figures are regional averages — use your own local numbers; the arithmetic itself is universal.
This book was written in collaboration with AI tools. Every worked example, exercise answer, and conversion factor was independently checked before publication — so what you see on the page is the arithmetic the book actually teaches.
Updated printing — August 2026. This edition adds a hand-drawn opening illustration to every chapter and prints every in-book diagram at a larger type size, so the figures read cleanly on paper. It also follows a fresh end-to-end recheck of all 385 problems — every area, volume, spacing, yield and calendar answer recomputed independently. No answers changed — the mathematics is the same book you already know, just easier to read.
The math behind a good garden is a small, friendly set of skills. This is your workout for it.
