Growing Taste:
A Home Food-Gardening Resource

This site is for home gardeners growing vegetables and fruits who have a deep interest in the taste of the food they grow and eat. While we give you a great deal of standardized information on how to grow your vegetables and fruits, the special feature of this site compared to most (really, virtually all) home-food-gardening sites is that we focus first and foremost on the flavor of the vegetables and fruits we grow, and that means giving definite advice about the particular varieties of each vegetable and fruit one might put in one’s garden.

This is not a “gourmet growers” site, though we suppose that folk who think of themselves as such will not be disappointed; but we don’t emphasize rare or oddball vegetables or types of vegetables. What we do emphasize is those varieties that reliably deliver the best eating quality of whatever vegetable or fruit they are, as well as being types that can and will grow readily in our gardens.

Of course, when we say “grow readily”, there are conditions: what is appropriate to northern Alaska and what is appropriate to southern Florida are very different things. Our focus here is on vegetables and fruits suitable for a moderate northerly climate with a somewhat short but rather warm growing season; but what will grow well in those hard conditions will then almost certainly grow well throughout most of the United States and Canada (among other places). If your “USDA Zone” is anything from 4 to 7, this should all be good advice for you, and it will probably be helpful to you even in more extreme zones.

The directory listings below will take you to pages that explain more fully how and why this home-gardening site was developed, and guide you through the information in it. But, in brief, we make no claims to any special expertise as gardeners—indeed, if we with our black thumbs can grow something, anyone can grow it—but we do think we have some real expertise in what is nowadays called “data mining”: extracting solid, useful, information, in this case about home vegetable and fruit gardening, from the huge and wild mass of truths, falsehoods, and half-truths that is the internet.

There is probably no vegetable or fruit variety for which one cannot find extravagent praise somewhere. But the fact remains that they cannot all be “the best”, as the seedsmen’s catalogues all claim for everything each sells. To make informed decisions, the home gardener needs to read dozens or hundreds of web pages and usenet posts about each vegetable and fruit, and to weigh with a sharply critical eye the likely authority behind each assertion about each vegetable and fruit. This we have tried to do for you.

(This year, as we used to every year, we are updating all information. The upper left corner of each site page will tell you if our update for that particular page is complete, but even for pages not yet fully updated for this year, the information is very probably still correct and useful.)

The directory a little farther below shows the layout of the entire site.

If you find this site interesting or useful, please link to it on your site by cutting and pasting this HTML:
The <a href="https://growingtaste.com/"><b>Growing Taste</b></a> Vegetable-Gardening Site

—Site Directory—

Search this site, or the web

	Web growingtaste.com

• Background Information about the purposes and design of this site
  • Introduction
    • Our Climate—
      • Our Location (USDA Zone Map)
      • Our Daily Weather: Table
      • Freezes & Frosts
      • Our Garden Design
  • An Apologia: why one should cultivate one's garden
  • Deep-Bed Gardening (forthcoming)
  • Container Gardening (forthcoming)
  • Vegetarian and Organic Considerations (forthcoming)
  
  
  
• Recommended Crops for a home garden, by variety
  • Vegetable Varieties
  • Herb and Spice Varieties
  • Fruit and Berry Varieties
  
  
  
• Gardening information and aids
  • Tools and Equipment
    • Garden Tools (forthcoming)
    • Seed-Starting (forthcoming)
    • Colored Plastic Mulches
  • A Garden Calendar
  • Estimated Seed Life in Storage
  
  
  
• Miscellaneous Information of interest to the home gardener
  • Links:
    • Vegetable-Gardening Links
    • On-Line Vegetable Seed & Plant Sellers
  • About Oxalic Acid in Vegetables [now at a site of its own: Oxalic-Acid Information]
  • About Induction Cooking [now at a site of its own: The Induction Site]
  • So Who Are We?
  
  
  

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