924 plants × 10,080 verified cities × 99 methods. Real NOAA data. No fluff.
Most container gardening advice was written for a hypothetical Zone-7 garden with cool nights and steady rain. That covers maybe 12% of the US. The rest of us are improvising. Here's what the generic guides get wrong.
Spring is March 18 in Phoenix and April 22 in Boston. A single sentence can't carry both. We give you a date — your date — from your nearest NOAA station.
A fabric pot of tomatoes in Tucson needs water twice a day in July. The same plant in a glazed ceramic pot indoors in Portland needs water once a week. "Regularly" is meaningless. Pot material × climate × plant — we work all three.
Which one? Kratky hydroponics uses no soil. Self-watering containers need a wicking-grade mix. Raised beds want 60% compost. Fabric pots burn through nitrogen. We match the media to the method.
Variety lists that ignore climate are why people give up. Better Boy cracks in humid Florida and bolts in dry Phoenix. We pick varieties by city, not by what's on the seed-rack endcap at Lowe's.
Tomato in Minneapolis is easy. Tomato in Miami is hard — fungal pressure, no chill hours, fruit-set drops above 90°F. We rate every plant × city combo EASY / MODERATE / HARD / VERY HARD. We tell you when something's a fight.
Every guide on this site is climate-coded down to the city. No state averages, no zone-wide hand-waving. Here's the spine of what makes us useful.
Most gardening sites operate on a fiction: that a planting calendar for "the Midwest" or "the Southwest" tells you anything actionable. It doesn't. Albuquerque and Denver share a region and barely share a climate — one is high desert at 5,300 ft, the other is high steppe at 5,280 ft with twice the snowpack. Phoenix and Tucson are 100 miles apart and run two weeks off each other for last frost.
So we started over. We pulled NOAA 1991-2020 normals for every weather station in the US and Canada. We mapped every city to the nearest station, layered in Köppen-Geiger climate codes, USDA hardiness zones, and AHS heat zones. Then we scored every plant against every city: chill hours, frost risk, heat tolerance, fungal pressure, day length. That's how we get to EASY / MODERATE / HARD / VERY HARD.
We don't pretend everything is easy. Cherries in Houston are hard. Avocados in Denver are very hard. Lettuce in Phoenix from May to September is hard. We say so.
The numbers behind the work. Every guide is generated from real data, then edited by a human who's grown the thing.
This is the difference. Pick a tomato guide for your actual city — not the national average.
Climate-coded growing guide. Variety picks, planting dates, and difficulty ratings tuned to your city.
Climate-coded growing guide. Variety picks, planting dates, and difficulty ratings tuned to your city.
Climate-coded growing guide. Variety picks, planting dates, and difficulty ratings tuned to your city.
Climate-coded plant guides keyed to your local frost dates, heat, and rainfall.
Climate-coded plant guides keyed to your local frost dates, heat, and rainfall.
Climate-coded plant guides keyed to your local frost dates, heat, and rainfall.
VegTrug-style V-shaped trough on legs creates an ergonomically perfect bed at waist height with a 12-18 inch deep V profile, but the geometr
Marine-grade aluminum panels deliver the longest life of any metal bed (40-50 years) with zero rust risk, but the soft metal dents easily an
Aluminum-zinc alloy coating (also marketed as Galvalume or Aluzinc) outlasts standard galvanizing by 2-4x in coastal and humid climates and
We're a team of 20 senior editors, 20 junior editors, and 60 regional contributors scattered from the Florida Keys to the Yukon. Some of us teach at land-grant extensions. Some run market farms. A few are retired horticulturists who finally have time to write down what they've learned. All of us got tired of the same thing: gardening sites that tell a Phoenix grower to plant tomatoes "after the last frost" — meaning February — and a Minneapolis grower the same thing — meaning May 22. Same sentence. Six-month difference.
So we wired the site differently. Every plant guide is locked to your city's climate before a word is written. The frost date is your frost date. The varieties are varieties that actually finish in your season. The watering schedule accounts for whether your pot is fabric, ceramic, or self-watering, and whether you live in 8% humidity or 92%.
We won't always tell you what you want to hear. If you ask us about avocados in Calgary, we'll tell you it's very hard and explain why. We think you deserve that honesty more than you deserve a cheerful guide that ends in dead plants. If that sounds like the kind of gardening site you've been looking for, you're in the right place.
— The Real Food Grower editorial team