Real Food Grower Editorial

How Real Food Grower is written

Real Food Grower is a research desk, not a bylined magazine. Every guide on this site is an analytical synthesis of primary sources — NOAA 1991–2020 climate normals, the USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Map (2023), WSU and OSU extension cultivar trials, ASPCA pet toxicity records, EWG pesticide residue reports — cross-referenced against our proprietary dataset of 30,074 US and Canadian cities and 924 cultivar profiles.

Our editorial approach: no composite personas, no fabricated bios, no bylines that don't trace to a real accountable entity. When a claim appears on this site, it traces to a published source (linked inline) or to Real Food Grower's own analytical work on the combined dataset. The methodology is the authority.

Primary source ecosystem

• NOAA NCEI — 1991–2020 climate normals; frost dates and temperature normals per station, mapped to the nearest station for each city we cover.
• USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Map (2023) — Zone assignments for minimum winter temperatures. We use the 2023 revision, not the 2012 version many sites still reference.
• WSU Extension & OSU Extension — Home fruit and vegetable handbooks, cultivar trial results, IPM guides.
• ASPCA Toxic and Non-Toxic Plants Database — Cat/dog toxicity flags for every plant guide.
• EWG Dirty Dozen and Clean Fifteen — Annual pesticide residue analysis powering the Pesticide Load Index (PLI) scoring.
• Köppen-Geiger climate classification — Beck et al. 2018 high-resolution reclassification, used to route climate-specific advice.

Editorial standards

A guide ships when three things are true: (1) every quantitative claim traces to a citable primary source or to Real Food Grower's own analysis of the combined dataset, (2) the guide is climate-locked to the target city's NOAA station and Köppen zone rather than published as generic advice, and (3) plant × city difficulty ratings and RFG scoring metrics are computed from the same underlying dataset every reader can audit. Corrections are visible at the top of any page that's been updated. If we get something wrong, tell us at [email protected].