This started with a simple, slightly annoying question: how much sun does a tomato actually need?
The answers were everywhere and nowhere. One site said “plenty.” Another said “full sun,” which only raised the question of what full means. A third gave a number with no reason to believe it. Underneath all of it sat a real answer, published by a university extension service, in a PDF almost nobody outside gardening has ever opened.
That gap is why this site exists.
Gardening is not hard. Learning it is.
Growing a radish is genuinely easy. Sow the seed half an inch down, keep it damp, eat it in a month.
Finding out that this is all you have to do — that turns out to be the hard part. Most advice is either too vague to act on (“water regularly”) or quietly assumes you already speak the language (“harden off before setting out transplants”). Neither helps when you are standing in a garden centre holding a seed packet, wondering what you have got yourself into.
So we write the version we wanted. Real numbers. Plain words. And a link to the glossary whenever a term turns up that you might not have met. If you had to look something up to follow one of our guides, that is our failure, not a gap in you.
We have not grown everything, and we will not pretend we have
Here is the part most sites leave out.
This is not written from a smallholding by someone who has been doing it for thirty years. There is no farm behind it. We are not going to tell you a story about our grandmother’s tomatoes.
What we do instead is take the sourcing seriously.
Every planting date, spacing, seed depth, soil temperature, days-to-harvest and sunlight figure here is cross-checked against US cooperative extension services — the free public research and advice arms of land-grant universities, staffed by people who spend entire careers on this. Frost dates come from NOAA weather-station records, not from a hardiness zone map that was never designed to carry them.
We name every source. The planting calendar lists which publication was used for what, and the data files behind it carry the same citations.
And where a number is only our own estimate — the costs, mostly, because no extension service publishes tool prices — the page says so, right next to the number. You should always be able to tell “a university researched this” from “we think it is about this much.”
That is the trade. No experience to sell you. Just sources you can check, and plain admission of the ones we do not have.
We change our minds in public
We have already corrected ourselves on this site, more than once.
The biggest one: we said a USDA hardiness zone tells you your frost dates. It does not — it describes average winter lows, and that is a different thing entirely. We had it wrong, extension publications set us straight, and now the calendar takes your own frost dates instead of guessing from your zone.
We also had sunlight too low, and eight crops’ days-to-harvest too optimistic.
Every page carries a “last updated” date that moves when the content does. If something here contradicts your local extension service, trust them — then please tell us, because corrections are the most useful mail we get.
Start smaller than you think
If you take one thing from this site, take this: one 4x8 bed, or five containers, and three or four crops.
The most common way a first garden fails is being too big to keep up with by July. That is not a discipline problem, it is arithmetic — a garden you can tend in twenty minutes is one you will still be tending in August. There is no prize for scale.
And everyone who grows food killed some plants getting there. That is the reassuring part, not the discouraging one.
The best advice is local, and it is free
Your county extension office knows your soil, your frost dates, and which varieties do well three streets from your house. We do not, and no national site can.
So we will keep sending you to them — along with community gardens, seed libraries, farmers markets and the neighbour with the good tomatoes. The resources page is mostly a list of how to find those people. They will teach you more in one season than we can.
How this stays free
Hosting and a domain cost money. The guides are free and always will be — no newsletter, no course, no membership, nothing to sign up for.
There can be ads and affiliate links here to support the making of the website. If we earn a commission, it is labelled where it appears, and it does not change what we recommend. The tool kit has a “what to skip” list that costs us money to publish, and it stays.
Start here
New to this? Begin with how to start a vegetable garden — the whole thing in nine steps. Then get your dates from the planting calendar, and pick a few crops from the easiest vegetables for beginners.
Questions, requests, or something we got wrong? Contact us.