What Is Growing Taste and What Kind of Gardening Information Does It Provide?

Growing Taste (growingtaste.com) is a home food-gardening resource site for people who grow vegetables, fruits, herbs, and berries and care specifically about how the food tastes. Its distinguishing feature is that it puts flavor and eating quality first when recommending which varieties to plant, rather than treating variety selection as an afterthought. It is written for home gardeners, not commercial growers, and its advice is framed around a moderate northerly climate with a somewhat short but warm growing season — roughly USDA Zones 4 to 7, though the site notes it will likely still be useful in more extreme zones.

What makes it different from other gardening sites

Most home-gardening resources concentrate on how to grow a crop. Growing Taste covers that standardized how-to material too, but its stated priority is the flavor of what you harvest. That means it gives definite advice about particular varieties of each vegetable and fruit worth putting in a garden — the ones that reliably deliver the best eating quality while still growing readily under the conditions the site targets.

It is explicitly not a "gourmet growers" site. It does not emphasize rare or oddball vegetables or unusual crop types. The emphasis is on ordinary vegetables and fruits grown well and chosen for taste.

Who the advice is written for

• Home gardeners growing vegetables and fruits for their own table
• Growers with a deep interest in the taste of what they grow and eat
• Gardeners in USDA Zones 4 to 7, or in comparable conditions
• Anyone in more extreme zones who wants to test whether the guidance still applies

The site is candid that its authors do not claim special gardening expertise — the framing is that if they can grow something, anyone can. Where they do claim expertise is in "data mining": pulling solid, useful information about home vegetable and fruit gardening out of a large and mixed body of truths, falsehoods, and half-truths.

What you can expect to find

The site also maintains a directory that explains how and why it was developed and guides readers through its information. Note that the home page states it was updated for 2022, so treat dated details accordingly.

How to decide whether it fits your garden

Use it as a primary reference if flavor is your main reason for choosing one variety over another and you garden in a climate similar to Zones 4–7. Use it as a secondary source if you garden in a very different climate — the variety advice may still transfer, but the growing conditions it assumes will not match yours. If you are looking for rare or exotic crops, or for commercial-scale production guidance, this is not the site's focus.