How this works, and why.

This site was created because most gardening resources fall into two camps: spec sheets with no voice, or editorial pieces so vague they could describe a garden anywhere on the continent. Neither helps when you’re standing in front of a struggling pepper plant in July wondering whether the problem is water, calcium, or a virus. The goal here was something that knew where you were, talked like a person, and admitted what it didn’t know.

Most gardening advice is written to be correct for the most people in the most places. That’s a reasonable goal, but it means it’s often wrong for any specific person in any specific place. A frost date calculated to cover everyone is a frost date that helps no one. This site tries to know your zip code before it tells you anything, and it tries to say so when it’s guessing.

The gardening in this site is ordinary kitchen-garden stuff: tomatoes, beans, squash, greens, root vegetables. The kind of gardening that has a yield problem and a storage problem and a pest problem every single season. Not showgarden ornamentals, not large-scale market farming. A half-acre or smaller, trying to grow food.

Every growing window, temperature threshold, amendment rate, and companion planting note on this site traces back to a cooperative extension source. That means Oregon State, Cornell CALS, NC State, University of Georgia, UMass Amherst, Rutgers, Utah State, Penn State, and a handful of others depending on the crop. Each plant page lists its sources at the bottom. Where those sources disagree — and they do, because soil and climate vary and research accumulates slowly — we say so rather than picking one arbitrarily.

Frost dates come from NOAA ACIS stations near your zip. Weather data from the National Weather Service. USDA hardiness zones from the 2023 Plant Hardiness Zone Map. Everything calculated from those inputs — when to sow, when to transplant, when to expect a first harvest — is recalculated live. No sign-up, no account, no data kept beyond your browser session.

When the honest answer to a question is “call your local extension office,” we say that instead of filling the space with something plausible-sounding. Extension staff handle these questions every season and they are not an obstacle. They are, in most cases, the best answer to questions about what’s actually happening in your specific county.

Days to maturity is a rough estimate. Yield is a rough estimate. Companion planting benefits are mostly anecdote gathered into a consensus — real, but not the kind of real you should plan a garden around. Frost dates are a probability, not a promise: your historical last spring frost date means 50% of years had their last frost before that date and 50% after. We try to be clear about which numbers are hard facts and which are informed approximations.

Conditional language on this site is deliberate. “Tends to,” “can,” “usually,” “in most years.” A garden is not a machine. The same variety planted in the same bed will behave differently in a wet June than in a dry one, will grow faster in a warm spring than a cold one, and will produce differently the second year in a bed that the first year depleted. We won’t pretend otherwise.

Where we note a confidence level on a data point — “high confidence,” “approximate,” “estimates vary” — that reflects how consistent the underlying extension sources were. High confidence means multiple sources gave us the same number or range. Estimates vary means the sources disagreed meaningfully and you should check your specific region.

Every plant page is cross-checked against at least one cooperative extension source before going live, and a last-reviewed date appears at the bottom of each one. Where a plant page has been reviewed by someone with formal horticultural training or a master gardener credential, that’s noted at the bottom.

If you find a fact that is wrong, a claim that sounds invented, or language that sounds like a machine rather than a person, we want to know. The contact section below is the right place for that. A correction with a source is more useful than a correction without one, but either is welcome.

The site doesn’t have a feedback form yet — it’s on the list. In the meantime, the best way to reach the team is through the contact link in the footer. We read everything about factual errors, missing plants, or regional gaps.

If you’re a master gardener or cooperative extension educator and you’d like to flag something specific to your region, we’re particularly interested in that. Extension specialists are the primary sources for this site. Local knowledge beats what anyone can find online almost every time.

The work is ongoing. More plants, better regional notes, a rotation planner that knows about the rest of your beds, a harvest journal you actually want to keep. It ships when it’s good enough, and then it gets better.