Where it started
I grew up in Salt Lake City on a quarter of an acre, and my mother grew just about everything in the backyard. Fruit trees lined the whole fence: two apples, a peach, a pear, a nectarine, two cherries and two plums. There was a strawberry patch, a rhubarb patch, seasonal vegetables and seas of corn stalks. When we picked peas, for every one I put in her bowl, one went in my mouth. She grew so much that she canned the surplus, and the storage room in the basement was full of plums and pears, jams, jellies and syrups, all from our yard. I grew up thinking most people did this.
Then we moved to San Jose, where nobody had a garden in their yard. I don't remember seeing a single one all the way through high school.
Years later I moved to Texas and thought I might garden in my tiny front yard. About all that came of it was a banana tree a friend gave me. I named him Bernie, and he came back every single year.
Back in California it was apartments, so a yard wasn't available. I signed up for the community garden program and, frankly, forgot about it. Three and a half years later, I got a call asking if I was still interested in a plot, because one had just opened up. I moved through a couple of plots over the first few years, trying to find the right one, made lots of mistakes and had lots of successes along the way.
The houseplants started with Clyde, a plant my husband brought home from his office. There are almost 300 now. Let's hope he doesn't see that number.
That childhood backyard is the first reason the Guild exists. I'd like growing something to be what most people do, whether it's a true backyard, a balcony, or a single flower or a cactus.
Why it shows its work
The second reason is that so little gardening advice shows its work. I wanted a place where the reasoning is visible: here's what the plant is doing, here's the published research that says so, here's what that means for the pot on your windowsill.
My background is a mix of formal education and a lot of years actually growing things. Plenty of those years went into getting it wrong and learning what not to do. I think about plants the way you'd think about any system with inputs and constraints. Water moves through a substrate according to physics, not vibes. A root needs oxygen as much as it needs moisture. Most of what gets called a green thumb is really just someone who has learned to read those constraints and stopped fighting them.
That's the whole editorial project, really: take the science seriously, then say it plainly enough to be useful at 7am before work.
Where the knowledge comes from
Most of it comes from growing: the houseplants, mostly aroids; seasonal herbs and vegetables on the balcony and in a community-garden plot; my own substrate trials; and a small tissue-culture setup. The rest comes from reading the research, which is why every factual claim on this site carries a citation you can check. I'd rather you trust the sources than take my word for it.
What I actually do here
I write the entries, chase down the citations and build the site. It's a one-person operation, which has an upside and a downside. The upside is that nothing gets published that I don't personally stand behind. The downside is that it moves at the pace one person can sustain, so entries land when they're right rather than when a calendar says so.
When I get something wrong, I fix it and say what changed. How that works is written up in Sources & Methods, along with the ladder of sources I work down and what counts as good enough to publish.
Independence
The Planters' Guild is an independent publication, not affiliated with any university or extension program. Nobody pays for coverage here. If a link ever earns a commission, it's labeled where it appears and on the Recommendations page. If you ever spot something on this site that looks like it breaks that, tell me and I'll fix it.
