Editorial Policy

Sourcing

Factual claims are traceable to university extension services, USDA regulations, or published trial data, and linked inline so you can check the original. Where a figure comes from a research group rather than from the extension page cited alongside it, the text says so rather than letting the link imply a source it does not have.

Extension services are preferred over other gardening sites for a straightforward reason: they publish under institutional review, they cite their own trials, and they issue corrections. Most gardening content does none of those things.

Where the sources disagree

Some subjects are genuinely unsettled. No-dig versus tilling, the efficacy of companion planting, whether homemade sprays are advisable — on these, extension guidance is frequently more cautious than the popular consensus, and sometimes extension services disagree with each other.

Those subjects are written as open questions. Where a claim is contested, the page says it is contested and gives the strongest version of each position. Manufacturing a confident answer where the evidence does not support one is the failure mode this site exists to avoid.

Personal experience

This site does not publish invented experience. There are no fabricated trial results, no made-up yield figures, and no personal experiments that did not happen. When a page describes what happens under some condition, it is reporting research findings or grower-reported outcomes, and it identifies which.

Funding and links

The site carries no advertising, no sponsored posts, and no paid placements. Nobody pays to be mentioned here, and nobody has editorial input except the author.

Outbound links fall into two kinds:

Sources. Extension services, universities, USDA. These are the majority of links on the site and exist so you can verify what you read.

Suppliers. Occasionally a page names a specific supplier, where the practical answer to a reader's question is "here is somewhere that actually does this." These are named because they meet the standard the page describes, not because of any commercial arrangement. Where a page names a supplier, it says why.

If that ever changes — if this site takes affiliate revenue or sponsorship — this page will say so before it happens, not after.

Corrections

Errors get corrected on the page, and the page notes that it was changed and when. Corrections are not quietly edited in.

If you find something wrong, tell me. Corrections from readers who know a subject better than I do are the most useful mail this site gets, and extension agents and commercial growers who spot an error are especially welcome to say so.

Scope

This site covers home-scale growing. It is not a commercial production guide, and where a practice differs at commercial scale, pages say so. For questions specific to your soil, climate, and local pest pressure, your state extension service will give you a better answer than any national site — including this one.