Gardening guides
Photo: Gary Barnes, Pexels License via Pexels
These guides cover the jobs that come up whatever you grow: repotting, watering, taking cuttings, dividing a clump, pruning, starting seed, and getting tender plants through the winter. Each one is written from cited sources, and each step says why it is done rather than only what to do, because the reason is what lets you adapt a step to a plant the guide never mentions. Where a job depends on the kind of plant, the guide says which kinds it applies to instead of pretending that one method suits everything. Nothing here is written from experience on this site. Every instruction comes from a published source, is cited where it appears, and carries the date that source was read, so you can follow it back and see how old it is.
Everything in this section
- Air layering
- Choosing a grow light
- Cleaning houseplant leaves
- Composting basics
- Dealing with houseplant pests
- Dividing perennials
- Fertilizing houseplants
- Frost dates explained
- Hardening off seedlings
- Houseplants outdoors for summer
- How to repot a houseplant
- How to water houseplants
- Improving clay soil
- Lifting and storing tender bulbs
- Mulching basics
- Planting fall bulbs
- Planting garlic
- Potting soil mixes
- Propagating from stem cuttings
- Repotting succulents
- Setting up a raised bed
- Settling in a new houseplant
- Soil testing and pH
- Staking and supporting plants
- Starting seeds indoors
- Water propagation
- Watering succulents
- When to plant vegetables
What's here
The guides are grouped by task below. Where a job is tied to a time of year, the guide names the season it belongs to and explains what that season stands for, because the right moment for a job is a fact about the plant and the climate rather than about today's date. That grouping is fixed in the registry, so a guide is never re-labelled with a season it was not written for, and no page changes its advice because of when you happen to read it. Timing is given relative to your own first and last freeze dates wherever the source states it that way, and the frost-date tool will work those out for your ZIP code from NOAA station normals. Guides link to the plants they apply to, and plant pages link back to the guides for the jobs that plant needs, so you can arrive from either direction. Where a guide and a plant page disagree, the plant page wins: it is the one carrying the source for that particular species. A guide that would need a claim no source supports is left unwritten rather than filled in, which is why this list grows slowly.