Where our data comes from

🌱 “Native to your area”

• This is flagged at the state level - matched to your zip code's state - not down to your specific county. A plant native to one part of a large state may not actually occur naturally near you.
• The base source is BONAP (Biota of North America Program), which distinguishes truly native populations from “adventive” ones - a plant that's native to North America somewhere, but was introduced and has spread into a state outside its original range. We only flag the former as native. BONAP also has county-level detail for about 36 states so far; where that's available it's a good next step for finer-grained checking than we currently show.
• Where BONAP's data is incomplete for a plant, or a result looks genuinely unclear, we research it against other reputable sources (state Cooperative Extension guides, native plant society databases) rather than guessing or leaving it blank. That's our standing process for every plant we add, not a one-time cleanup.
• A few cultivated garden varieties (like zucchini or bell pepper) are close relatives of a wild native plant, but the variety you're actually growing is a domesticated selection quite different from that wild ancestor.

❄️ Frost dates

• Sourced from NOAA's official 1991-2020 Climate Normals - 30 years of real weather station data, not a live forecast.
• We show a range (a “safe” and a “typical” date) instead of one single date, because frost timing is genuinely a probability, not a fixed day on the calendar.
• Your zip code is matched to the nearest weather station with a solid, reliable data record - not always literally the closest station, if a closer one has a weak or incomplete history.

☀️ Sun & shade

• Full Sun - needs 6+ hours of direct sun a day to perform well.
• Part Sun / Part Shade - does well with roughly 3-6 hours of direct sun, or a full day of dappled, filtered light.
• Full Shade - can grow with less than 3 hours of direct sun.
• This rating is the most shade a plant can tolerate, not necessarily its single best condition - check a plant's own notes for whether it merely tolerates shade or truly prefers it.

💧 Water needs

• Low - drought-tolerant once established; let the soil dry out between waterings.
• Moderate - water regularly, keeping soil evenly moist but not soggy.
• High - keep soil consistently moist, especially in hot weather.
• These are relative to a typical garden plant, not an exact schedule - actual needs vary with your soil, climate, and whether it's in a container or in the ground.

🦋 Pollinator-friendly

A plant is only marked pollinator-friendly when a Xerces Society plant list or a Cooperative Extension publication names it. Every rated plant shows its source line.

• What counts - the plant is documented as a nectar or pollen source that draws pollinators, or as a host plant that caterpillars feed on. We list which groups the source names: bees, butterflies, hummingbirds, moths, flies, wasps, or beetles.
• Species, not just genus - a rating for one species doesn't automatically carry to a relative. Where a source states genus-, crop-, or family-level scope itself (“Rubus species,” “cucurbit crops”), we use it and say so on the plant's page.
• Not rated isn't the same as no - many heavily bred bedding and cut-flower ornamentals simply haven't been rated by anyone we'd cite. Those plants say “no pollinator rating yet” rather than being quietly marked unfriendly. A handful of plants are marked “not a pollinator plant” - but only when a source says so, not because we couldn't find one.
• Cultivars and timing matter - pollen-less sunflowers bred for cut flowers feed nothing, doubled flowers can be hard for a bee to work, and a herb or leafy green only feeds anything if you let it bloom. Where that applies, it's on the plant's page.

🧪 Edible, toxic, & traditional use

This holds a higher sourcing bar than the rest of our plant data, since getting it wrong is a real safety issue, not just a UX gap. Each plant's page shows a short source line; this is the fuller explanation of what stands behind it.

• Per-part, not one flattened line. A plant can have several different parts, each with its own edible, traditional-use, and/or toxic entry - Sunflower, for example, has seeds, petals, and buds independently marked edible, plus a separate traditional-use note and a separate toxicity note. This is a category-by-category rewrite of an older, flatter version of this data (flowers first) - a plant showing only the older single-line style just hasn't been through the rewrite yet, not a sign it was skipped.
• Edible and toxic parts - sourced from university Cooperative Extension offices and established toxicology references, cross-checked against peer-reviewed literature where the topic warrants it (a specific compound, mechanism, or dose). Framed plainly: which parts are eaten, which aren't, and why - including prep requirements where a source states them (e.g. cooking, or removing a specific part before eating).
• Traditional use - deliberately not called “medicinal.” We only note that a plant part has a documented history of traditional or folk use, phrased as “traditionally used for...” - never as a health claim, never implying a plant treats, cures, or benefits any condition, and never dosing or other directive language telling you to use it that way. We'd rather leave this blank than include something thinly sourced - tomato, for example, has no entry here, even though folk-medicine claims about it exist online, because what we could find traced back to alternative-medicine marketing rather than a source we'd trust for this.
• Pet toxicity - dogs and cats specifically, sourced only from the ASPCA's published toxic and non-toxic plant list, including their exact wording on the toxic principle and clinical signs where a plant is listed as toxic.
• None of this is ever general knowledge or a guess - if we can't point to one of the source types above for a specific plant part, we leave that field blank rather than fill it in.
• We're rolling this out plant by plant with review, not all at once - most plants don't have this section populated yet. Absence of a warning is not the same as confirmed safety; it may just mean we haven't added it yet.
• This is informational only, not medical or veterinary advice. Always verify independently before consuming any plant or trying any traditional use. If you suspect a poisoning, contact Poison Control (1-800-222-1222) for humans or the ASPCA Animal Poison Control Center (1-888-426-4435) for pets.

❓ When a field is blank

This applies to everything on this page, not just one badge. A blank field almost always means no source we'd cite has published on it - not that we checked and found the answer to be no. Two causes account for most of the blanks:

• Naming and taxonomy mismatches - a source lists a close relative rather than the plant you're looking at, or the same common name attaches to a different species. Beach plum isn't covered by a page about garden plums; the “hyssop” on pollinator lists is usually anise hyssop, a different plant entirely. We don't carry a rating across that gap.
• Bred ornamentals - pollinator and native-plant research concentrates on wild species, so the bedding and cut-flower plants filling most gardens are simply understudied.

Where we can explain a specific blank, the plant's own page says why. We'd rather show you a gap than fill it with a guess.

🔄 Crop rotation

• Every plant in our database carries its botanical family (Solanaceae, Brassicaceae, and so on), which is a fixed taxonomic fact rather than something we had to research plant-by-plant.
• The guidance itself only shows up on vegetables and herbs. Crop rotation is a practice for annual beds that get replanted every year - most flowers and fruit are perennial plantings that don't get “rotated” the same way, even when they happen to share a family with a vegetable.
• Within vegetables and herbs, we only wrote guidance for the roughly a dozen families that home gardeners actually plan rotation around - nightshades, brassicas, cucurbits, legumes, the carrot family, the beet family, alliums, the lettuce/aster family, corn, sweet potato, and okra. A vegetable or herb outside those families still shows its family name, just without a rotation blurb - most of what's left is either a single minor crop or, like most of our perennial herbs, not something normally replanted bed to bed.
• This is general horticultural guidance, not a per-plant sourced citation the way our safety and pollinator data is - think of it as similar to a seed-packet planting note.

📅 Monthly task list

• My Calendar's Tasks view has two kinds of content. Planting and harvest/bloom windows are the same sourced timing data used everywhere else in the calendar, just regrouped by month. Fertilizer and pest guidance is general horticultural content, not a per-plant sourced citation - the same “seed-packet planting note” treatment as crop rotation above, not our safety or pollinator data's sourcing bar.
• Fertilizer and pest guidance only covers vegetables, herbs, and fruit - not flowers, which don't have an established “feeder type” convention to classify against. Fertilizer guidance is keyed by nutrient-demand bucket (heavy/moderate/light) crossed with botanical family, since some families need a fundamentally different approach than their feeder type alone would suggest - legumes fix their own nitrogen despite fruiting, grapes want less nitrogen despite being a vigorous vine, and so on. Pest guidance is family-level, covering the common, nameable pests for the families with real patterns worth flagging - not every family in our database has an entry.
• Where an NPK ratio is genuinely standard for the kind of feeding called for, we name one (e.g. a balanced 10-10-10, or a low-nitrogen 5-10-10 for fruiting/flowering-stage feeding). Where it isn't - a “phosphorus-rich starter” blend varies too much by product and by whether the target is an annual transplant or a woody perennial, for instance - we describe the type of formulation instead of inventing a number. Same “blank is a real answer” rule the rest of this database follows, applied to editorial content instead of a sourced field.
• The Tasks view itself shows only a short summary per plant - a ratio-type label for fertilizing, or just the pest name(s) to watch for. The full explanation (exact wording, establishment-vs-mature detail, pest identification and control) lives on each plant's own page, under “Fertilizing & pest watch” - tap a plant name in the task list to get there.
• Where a pest is common enough on a family that a specific proactive step is worth taking before it shows up - row covers ahead of an egg-laying moth, wrapping a squash vine's base before borer season, clearing debris after harvest to deny next year's overwintering site - that shows as a “Prevent” line, both in the Tasks view and on the plant's own page. Where it isn't (aphids, and most pests that only announce themselves after the fact, like a borer's wilted cane), the honest guidance is to watch and treat if you see it, not a preventative step we'd be inventing to fill the space.
• Watering isn't included here on purpose - each plant's own page already covers its water needs.
• A fertilizer or pest task shows up in every month of a plant's active growing season for a short season, or a handful of evenly-spaced check-in months for a long one (a fall-planted crop, or a perennial establishing over several years) - this is a rough guide to when to check in, not an exact feeding schedule tracked to the week.

🗺️ State guide

• Each state's guide - soil, common pests, climate character, garden prep, and urban/vertical gardening - is sourced from that state's own Cooperative Extension System publications (the land-grant university Extension service for your state), read directly rather than taken from a search-result summary. Every guide shows its source list at the bottom of the page.
• It's matched to you at the state level, the same way native-plant flagging is - not down to your county or exact microclimate. Large states with real internal variation (coastal vs. inland, north vs. south) say so in the guide itself rather than forcing one answer.
• We're rolling this out state by state, not all 50 at once. A state without a guide yet isn't a data gap being hidden - it just hasn't been written yet. As with everything else on this page, a blank section within a written guide means no Extension publication we'd cite covers that topic for that state, not that we checked and found nothing.

🤝 Companion planting

Grouped from standard, widely-used companion-planting guidance, not controlled scientific studies. See each plant's page for its specific companions.