Our Mission
Real Food Grower exists to give home growers gardening advice that fits the climate they actually live in. Most of the gardening web was written for a hypothetical Zone-7 yard with cool nights and steady rain — that covers maybe 12% of the country. The rest of us are improvising. We think you deserve guides built around your frost date, your heat, your humidity, and the container you actually have on the balcony.
We are an anti-"plant in spring" publisher. Spring is March 18 in Phoenix and April 22 in Boston. A single sentence cannot carry both, so we stopped writing one. Every guide on this site is locked to a city before a word goes into it.
How We're Different
Three things make us a little unusual in the gardening category:
- Köppen-coded down to the city. Every city we cover carries its Köppen-Geiger climate class — Phoenix is BWh hot desert, Seattle is Csb cool-summer Mediterranean, Miami is Aw tropical savanna. The growing calendar, the variety picks, and the watering schedule all shift to match.
- NOAA actuals, not state averages. Our frost dates come from the 1991-2020 station normals at NOAA NCEI, mapped to the nearest station for each city. The last 30 years is the climate you actually grow in — not the 50-year mean that ignores how much things have shifted.
- Honest difficulty ratings. We score every plant × city combination EASY / MODERATE / HARD / VERY HARD and we publish the hard ones. Cherries in Houston are hard. Avocados in Denver are very hard. We tell you why, and we tell you when it's a fight worth having.
Our Editorial Team
Real Food Grower is written by a team of 100 working farmers and home growers scattered across 24 states: 20 senior editors, 20 junior editors, and 60 regional contributors. Texas guides are written by people in Texas. Maine guides are written by people in Maine. Some of our editors 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.
Our Data Sources
Every climate number on this site is sourced. We don't make up frost dates. We don't average regions. The data we lean on the hardest:
- NOAA NCEI — National Centers for Environmental Information. Frost dates, temperature normals, growing-degree-day baselines from the 1991-2020 station normals.
- USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Map (2023) — The official zone map for minimum winter temperatures. We use the 2023 revision, not the 2012 version most sites still reference.
- Köppen-Geiger Climate Classification — From the University of Vienna's Institute of Meteorology. Five major climate groups, thirty sub-classes, the most useful single number for matching a plant to a place.
- USGS — Soil and elevation context for cities where it changes the calculus (high desert, coastal sand, alpine).
- ASPCA Toxic & Non-Toxic Plant List — Pet-safety flags on every plant guide so dog and cat owners can make informed picks.
- USDA AMS — Variety-trial and seed-availability data behind our variety recommendations.
Editorial Standards
A guide ships on this site when three things are true: a working grower in the climate has signed off on the difficulty rating; the frost dates and zone match the cited NOAA station; and at least one variety on the pick list has been grown by someone on the team in the last three seasons. We re-review every plant × city guide annually against the latest NOAA normals release. Corrections are dated and visible at the top of any page that's been updated. If we get something wrong, we want to hear about it — email info@realfoodgrower.com with the URL and the problem.
Our Coverage
Real Food Grower currently publishes 10,264 climate-coded guides covering 50 plants × 100 US cities × 99 growing methods. The methods include the usual suspects (fabric pots, raised beds, self-watering containers) and a lot of less common ones (Kratky hydroponics, vertical towers, sub-irrigated planters, hügelkultur, straw bales, AeroGardens).
We are mid-rollout. The active library covers 924 plants × 10,080 verified US cities × 99 growing methods — every city with real NOAA climate data. We publish guides in priority order: the most-grown plants in the most-populous cities first, then expand the long tail as we verify more climate data. If your city is not yet covered and you want to be next, see contact.
Get In Touch
Editorial questions, corrections, partnership inquiries, or a city you want covered next — the door is open. Contact the team →