How GrowingHQ works
Growing advice is full of confidently repeated claims that nobody has checked. This page explains how GrowingHQ separates what is measured from what is practised, from what is merely repeated.
A fact here is a claim with a provenance
“Thin carrots to 5 cm” is not a fact about a carrot. It is a claim, made by somebody, on some basis, for some climate, possibly contradicted by somebody else. GrowingHQ stores all of that, because the parts usually thrown away are exactly the parts you need when your carrots fail and the seed packet and the book disagree.
The catalogue currently holds 12,852 claims carrying 9,302 citations. That number is derived from the data rather than typed into this sentence: every value in every record is stored with an evidence envelope, and there is no way to write a value into GrowingHQ without one, because the type does not permit it.
What kind of support stands behind it
Shown as the first chip beside any value you can open. This axis says where the claim came from — it says nothing about how strongly we hold it.
| Label | What it means |
|---|---|
| Measured / trialled | A measurement, trial result or direct observation reported by an identified source. |
| Sourced guidance | A recommendation attributable to a specific named authority. |
| Horticultural consensus | Broad agreement across published horticultural guidance, without a single citable locus. Not a measurement. |
| Traditional practice | Long-standing common practice. Widely done and often sensible, but not established by trial — treat it as a starting point rather than a finding. |
| Derived from other data | Follows from other stored claims by a stated rule. |
| Calculated | Produced by a stated calculation from inputs shown on the page. |
| Legal or label requirement | Imposed by law or by a product label in the named jurisdiction. Always check the current label and local rules before acting. |
| GrowingHQ editorial position | A GrowingHQ position taken where the evidence is incomplete. Labelled so you can discount it. |
| Insufficient evidence | We looked and there is not enough reliable information to state a value. |
Where the claim stands
A separate axis, and the one that handles folklore. Established guidance and a widely repeated belief that trials do not support are both things people say confidently; only one of them belongs in a recommendation.
| Label | What it means |
|---|---|
| Established | Well supported and consistent across authorities. You can act on it directly. |
| Depends on conditions | Sound, but only under the conditions stated alongside it. Read the condition before applying the claim. |
| Sources disagree | Competent sources genuinely disagree. GrowingHQ shows the disagreement rather than picking a winner. |
| Commonly said, not supported | Widely repeated advice that the available evidence does not support. Recorded so it can be addressed, never as a recommendation. |
Unsupported claims can never be shown as advice
A claim marked “commonly said, not supported” exists in the dataset only so that GrowingHQ can address it. The component that renders guidance refuses to display one, and an audit fails the build if such a claim reaches a plant record at all — so it can appear on a problem page as a correction and nowhere else. That is a property of the code, not a policy anybody has to remember.
How strongly we hold it
A deliberately coarse five-point scale. Nothing in this domain supports two significant figures of epistemic precision, and “confidence: 0.82” would be a false one.
high, moderate, low, very-low — and unknown, which is a real answer and is meant to stay cheap to give. A schema with no way to say “we do not know” gets filled with guesses, and a catalogue of guesses is worth less than an empty one.
When sources disagree
Overlapping ranges are not a disagreement. Three sources saying “thin to 5 cm”, “4–6 cm” and “5–8 cm” are describing the same carrot through different lenses, and calling that a dispute would be noise. Ranges that barely overlap, or do not overlap at all, are a real conflict — those are flagged on the claim and the disagreement is shown rather than averaged away.
Collapsing several sources into one confident number is the commonest way growing information becomes wrong, because the collapse is invisible afterwards.
Timing is stored against a climate, not a calendar
Most growing sites store timing as twelve boolean columns — a UK monthly chart with no way to express that the same tomato is sown in February in a heated propagator and in June in Aberdeen. GrowingHQ stores the thing that travels: the window relative to a climate anchor, such as “six to eight weeks before your last frost”. The month grid on each page is DERIVED for a named region and says so.
Where an authority published a month list for a specific region, that is stored too and tagged with the region it describes — real evidence about that place, and never presented as a universal truth.
What we do with other people's work
GrowingHQ fetches nothing, parses nothing and transcribes nothing. A human editor reads an organisation’s published guidance, establishes what the horticultural facts are, and writes them into GrowingHQ’s own structured fields with the source named. The facts — that a carrot wants deep stone-free soil — are not anybody’s property. The prose is, and it stays where it was published.
The source register lists every organisation cited, what it is authoritative for, and how its material may be used.
Safety, without a disclaimer on everything
Growing genuinely involves toxic plants, regulated chemicals and water next to electricity. It also involves a great deal of ordinary activity that needs no warning at all — and a page that warns about secateurs before explaining pruning has trained its reader to skip the warnings, so the one that mattered goes past unread.
So a safety note has to earn its place: it names a specific hazard, who is at risk, and what to do. An audit rejects generic hedging. Two rules are absolute — GrowingHQ never gives pesticide application instructions, because the product label is legally binding and is the document you are holding; and where a plant has both edible and harmful parts, the record says which is which.