Last updated: 28 July 2026
Gardening advice online has a credibility problem. Plenty of it is reworded from other blogs, which were themselves reworded from somewhere else, until a claim about watering frequency has travelled a long way from anyone who ever checked it. This page sets out how The Garden Den tries to avoid being part of that chain, and how to hold it to account when it fails.
Where the information comes from
Guides here are researched against horticultural sources rather than assembled from other gardening blogs. In practice that means leaning heavily on university extension services such as Penn State, NC State, Oregon State and UF/IFAS, because they publish region-specific, peer-reviewed guidance and, crucially, have nothing to sell you.
Where a specific claim carries real consequences, such as soil pH tolerances, frost dates, pesticide safety, or whether a plant is toxic to cats, it is checked against a source of that kind, and the source is named in the guide so you can go and read it yourself.
How product recommendations are made
Product guides on this site are research-based rather than hands-on. Recommendations are built from manufacturer specifications, verified-purchase reviews at volume, materials and construction details, warranty terms, and how a product compares against others in its category on the things that actually matter for the job.
Where a guide has not personally tested a product, it does not claim to have done so. That distinction matters, and this site would rather be useful and honest about its limits than pretend to an authority it hasn’t earned.
Commercial relationships never influence a recommendation. The full detail of how affiliate links work, and what they do and don’t affect, is in the Affiliate Disclosure.
Who writes this
Everything on The Garden Den is written by Joe, who gardens in New England. There’s no anonymous content team and no ghost-written filler. You can read more on the About page.
Keeping guides current
Gardening advice goes stale. Hardiness zones shift, and the USDA updated its map in late 2023, moving roughly half of the US half a zone warmer. Products get discontinued. Recommended treatments get withdrawn.
So guides are reviewed and updated on an ongoing basis, and each one shows when it was last updated. A revised date means the content was genuinely re-checked, not that a word was changed to game a timestamp.
Corrections
Some of this will be wrong. That’s the nature of writing several hundred thousand words about living things across a dozen climates.
When an error is pointed out, the commitment is straightforward:
- Factual errors are corrected as quickly as they can be verified.
- Corrections that change the substance of a guide are noted on the page, rather than quietly edited away.
- If a recommendation turns out to be a bad one, it gets removed or rewritten, not left up because it earns.
If you’ve spotted something wrong, please send it in. Corrections from readers who actually grow the plant in question are among the most valuable messages this site receives.
What this site won’t do
- Recommend a product because it pays better.
- Claim experience it doesn’t have.
- Publish sponsored content without labelling it as such.
- Present an affiliate link as a neutral one. Every one is marked, on the page and in the markup.
- Offer advice on anything genuinely dangerous, such as pesticide application beyond label directions, or plant toxicity in a medical emergency, where you should be talking to your extension office, a poison control centre, or a vet.