About

I am AUTHOR_NAME. I grow food at home, I read more extension bulletins than is probably normal, and I started this site because I got tired of finding the same unsourced paragraph on eleven different gardening blogs.

What this site is

A working reference for organic and no-spray growing, aimed at home gardeners rather than commercial operations. Five subjects: what organic actually means as a regulated term, building soil, managing pests without spraying, starting plants and stretching the season, and growing berries.

Berries get their own section because they are where the most expensive mistakes happen. Perennial plantings carry their problems in with them, most of the serious diseases arrive on the plants rather than out of your soil, and by the time you find out, you have lost a season and a bed.

The standard

Every factual claim here is traceable to a university extension service, a USDA regulation, or published trial data, and linked so you can check it. That is not decoration. It is the only thing separating this from the content it was written in response to.

Three commitments that follow from it:

No invented experience. You will not find fabricated trial results on this site — no "I planted forty crowns and here is my yield data." When I write about what happens, I am reporting what the research shows and what growers report, and I say which.

Disagreement gets reported as disagreement. No-dig versus tilling, companion planting, homemade sprays — there are subjects where good sources genuinely conflict, and where extension guidance is more cautious than the popular consensus. Those get written as open questions, not settled ones.

Corrections are made in public. If something here is wrong, it gets fixed and the page notes that it changed.

What this site is not

It is not a shop. It is not a substitute for your local extension office, who know your soil, your climate, and your specific pest pressure far better than any national site can. Most state extension services answer questions from home gardeners for free, and it is the most underused resource in gardening.

For how the site is funded and how links are handled, see Editorial Policy.

Questions and corrections: contact.