About Loam & Bloom

Loam & Bloom exists because most gardening content online falls into one of two failure modes: vague enough to be useless ("water regularly," "provide adequate light") or padded past the point where the actual answer is buried in the fifth paragraph. We built this site to answer one real question per article, completely, and stop.

What "researched" actually means here

Every factual claim on this site — soil temperatures, spacing, timing windows, treatment thresholds — is checked against a specific named source before publication, not general familiarity with the topic. We lean on university cooperative extension programs (Cornell, University of Minnesota, Clemson HGIC, Purdue, and similar land-grant institutions), the USDA, and established horticultural references. Each article's "Sources & further reading" section names exactly where its claims came from, so you can check our work instead of taking it on faith.

When extension guidance genuinely differs by region — and it often does — we say so rather than presenting one answer as universal. Where a recommendation depends on climate, we point to USDA hardiness zones or a local extension office rather than guessing on your behalf.

Where we're honest about our limits

We are not a team of professional horticulturists writing from decades of personal growing experience, and we're not going to pretend otherwise. What we do have is a disciplined research-and-verification process: every guide starts from a real question, gets checked against the sources above, and gets corrected in public when we're wrong. If that's a different value proposition than a lifelong gardener's blog, it's still a genuine one — traceable claims over unverifiable authority.

What we don't do

• We don't publish a claim we can't trace to a credible horticultural source or well-established extension guidance.
• We don't pad articles to hit a target word count. If a question has a two-paragraph answer, that's the length of the article.
• We don't accept payment to recommend products, and we disclose any affiliate relationships if we ever add them (see ourdisclaimer).

Our editorial standards

The full version lives on our editorial policy page, including exactly how content here gets drafted. The short version: traceable sourcing over unverifiable authority, accuracy over speed, corrections made promptly and visibly.

Get in touch

Spotted an error, or a gap between what a source actually says and what we wrote? Tell us — reach us through thecontact page. Corrections are the fastest way this site gets better.