About Explore Your Garden

Last updated: May 2026 · Author: Eleanor B., Lead Editor

Explore Your Garden is an independent gardening publication for home growers who want advice that actually works. We publish hands-on guides, plant profiles, tool and seed reviews, and seasonal calendars — all tested in real gardens, written by real gardeners, with the kind of granular detail that helps a beginner get a tomato to fruit and helps an experienced gardener push past a plateau.

We are not a content farm. We are not a Pinterest-aesthetic lifestyle blog. We are not the comments section of an algorithm. We are a small editorial team writing about gardening from inside our own gardens, on the schedule that real gardening imposes — which means we write about overwintering when overwintering matters, not whenever the keyword research peaks.

How this site started

Explore Your Garden was founded in summer 2019. The first article we published was a long, frustrated piece about why most beginner gardening advice on the internet fails the actual beginner: too much aspirational photography, too little information about what to do when the seedlings damp off in week two and you have no idea why. The piece was personal, opinionated, and useful, and the reader response was the proof of concept that built the rest of the site.

Six years later, we are still writing for that same reader: the home gardener with a plot or balcony or back garden, more enthusiasm than experience, and a strong allergy to advice that does not actually help.

What we publish

Editorial content on the site falls into five core categories:

• How-to guides — sowing, transplanting, pruning, overwintering, propagating. Long-form, photographed in real gardens, written for the gardener who needs to know what to do this weekend, not someday.
• Plant profiles — what a plant is, where it grows, what it needs, what commonly goes wrong, and our personal experience growing it. Written by a team member who has actually grown the plant.
• Tool and product reviews — we test garden tools, seeds, soil amendments, and equipment in real conditions across multiple seasons. Our methodology is described on the How We Test page; the editorial wall is described on Editorial Standards.
• Seasonal calendars and reminders — what to do this week, by climate zone, with explanations rather than checklists.
• Cultural and historical features — long pieces on the cultural history of common garden plants, the development of gardening practices, the people who shaped horticulture. The pieces that take a month to write.

Who runs the site

The editorial team is small and stable. Eleanor B. is the lead editor and senior gardener; she has been gardening for more than fifteen years, holds the Royal Horticultural Society Level 2 Certificate in the Principles of Horticulture, and runs a 1,500-square-meter mixed garden in Surrey, England, that serves as our primary test plot for hardy ornamentals and edible gardening. Theo H. covers plant identification and foraging; he is a botanist trained at Oregon State University with research interest in ethnobotany and a Pacific Northwest home base. Maya R. writes our sustainable practices and permaculture coverage from her organic smallholding in Galicia, Spain; she holds a Permaculture Design Certificate.

The site is published by Giovanni Picaro, who founded the publication and remains its publisher and the responsible legal entity. Giovanni is not the editorial voice of the site — that work is done by the gardeners — but he handles the business, technical, and operational side of running an independent publication.

Full bios are on Meet the Team.

What we believe about gardening writing

Four principles shape what we publish.

First, real gardens, real seasons. Our writing comes out of actual gardens we tend, in actual climates, across actual years. We can tell you that a particular tomato variety bolts in heat because we watched ours bolt last August.

Second, honest about failure. Most gardening goes wrong at least sometimes. We say so when ours does, and we write through the failure rather than around it. A guide to growing parsnips is more useful when it explains why parsnips often fail than when it presents an idealized success story.

Third, the editorial wall is real. Brands do not pay for favorable reviews. Affiliate relationships do not influence what we recommend. Where we have a commercial relationship with a product we are reviewing, we disclose it at the top of the article. The full set of standards is on our Editorial Standards page.

Fourth, respect for the reader’s time. We do not pad articles to hit a word count. We do not bury the practical answer beneath a thousand words of personal anecdote. Where personal experience is relevant, it is brief and pointed; where the reader just needs to know how to do the thing, we tell them how to do the thing.

Where we test

We are deliberately specific about test conditions because gardening advice that does not specify climate is gardening advice that often does not work.

• Surrey, southern England — Eleanor’s primary garden. Roughly USDA hardiness zone 8b, RHS hardiness rating H5. Cool maritime temperate climate, long mild autumn, occasional hard frosts. Heavy clay soil, improved over years.
• Pacific Northwest, USA — Theo’s test area. USDA zone 8a–8b, mild wet winters, dry summers, marine-influenced. Loam over clay subsoil.
• Galicia, northwestern Spain — Maya’s smallholding. Cool oceanic climate, mild wet winters, warm wet summers. Acidic clay-loam soil. Roughly USDA zone 9a.

When an article’s advice depends on climate — sowing dates, overwintering practice, pest pressure, varietal choice — we say which climate the advice was developed in, and we flag where readers in different climates should adjust.

What we will not do

To remove ambiguity:

• We will not publish articles generated by language models and dressed up as human writing. The full position is on our AI Usage Policy.
• We will not run “honest reviews” of products provided by manufacturers in exchange for friendly coverage.
• We will not publish plant identification or foraging advice without explicit safety framing. See our Plant Safety & Hazards page.
• We will not chase trending plants for their own sake. If a houseplant is everywhere because of a TikTok cycle, we will not pretend to find it more interesting than we do.

How to get involved

If you want to write for us, see Meet the Team for our submission policy. If you have a correction request, see Corrections Policy. If you want to discuss a partnership or sponsorship, see Work with Us. For everything else, the Contact Us page lists the right address for the right question.

Thanks for reading. We hope something here helps your garden grow.

Related pages: Our Mission · Meet the Team · Editorial Standards · How We Test · Contact Us