First things first: my goal with this site and promise to you is to always try to provide content that is useful, honest, and true to the best of my knowledge.
That said, this site does cost time and money to keep up, so in some posts I have included affiliate links to products I suggest or recommend. This means that if you click the link and/or choose to make a purchase that way, I get a small referral reward at no extra cost to you (in most cases a few cents worth of Amazon gift card).
With each link I will try to make it clear whether it is a product I have personally tried, one that I have heard good about from other gardeners, or just one that looks good to me “from a distance.”
Although I cannot promise that every product I love will work for everyone, my goal is your success as a gardener—never to trick you into buying something that won’t work for you. Read my recommendations carefully so that you won’t have unrealistic expectations, and above all make your own decision on how to spend your money. 🙂
Organic or not?
If you were wondering, this site is not specifically geared toward organic-only growing. 100% organic gardening is a wonderful goal to aim for, and something I want to get closer to myself! But, for those with less time or gardening experience (which is who this blog is written for), truly organic gardening may be a little overwhelming to jump into. Even some professional growers that I meet at the farmers markets (many of whom do use mostly organic practices) admit that becoming “certified organic” can be more trouble than it’s worth.
I look at “organic” as more of a spectrum.
On the one side, you have typical commercial agriculture with all the rows and sprays and chemicals and hothouses. That, of course, is the opposite of organic. On the other side, you have the gardener who makes all their own compost with only certified organic ingredients, has worked their soil to a science, sacrifices some of their crop to insects, uses only non-GMO, non-Monsanto seeds and BPA-free tools (or none) and would scoff at me for ever suggesting that you buy “bagged” soil or compost even if it is “so-called organic.”
I mean no disrespect, that pure organic gardener is quite impressive and I’d love to learn from them. But personally, I’m not there yet. Maybe you could say that getting there (or wherever you want to land) is a process, and in some ways gardening always is. My own place in that process, I think, is to get you started and growing so that once you get some successes under your belt, you can think through these things for yourself and work on your place on that spectrum along with me.
As for me, I fall somewhere in the middle of the spectrum.
I don’t use chemical pesticides (there are organic options!), but I admit one of my current favorite packaged soils does contain synthetic fertilizer. My goal, however, is to keep learning which organic products work well. I’m learning from my husband as he learns to make our own compost–which, despite being simple, is not quite as foolproof as it sounds–and does his own reading about organic fruit growing.
So that’s why this site is just about gardening, however you do it. Everyone starts somewhere! I hope I can be a support and resource on your journey and I look forward to learning together.