How Is Growing Taste Different from Other Home-Gardening Websites?

Growing Taste is a home food-gardening resource that puts flavor first. Instead of treating taste as a footnote to yield, pest control, or plant size, it starts from the eating quality of what you grow and works backward to recommend specific varieties. That makes it most useful if you already grow vegetables and fruits and want to choose what to plant based on how it tastes, rather than if you are looking for a broad beginner's overview of gardening itself.

Flavor comes before everything else

The site states plainly that its special feature, compared with most home-food-gardening sites, is that it focuses first and foremost on the flavor of the vegetables and fruits you grow. Standardized growing information is still provided, but it sits behind the question of which variety is actually worth eating.

This matters because most gardening resources organize themselves around categories like "tomatoes" or "beans" and treat variety as a detail. Growing Taste reverses that: the variety is the point, and the growing advice supports it.

It gives definite variety recommendations

Because flavor leads, the site commits to definite advice about the particular varieties of each vegetable and fruit you might put in your garden. That is a different posture from sites that list dozens of options and leave the choice to you.

If you want to be told "plant this one, it tastes best," that is the value here. If you prefer to browse a wide catalog and decide for yourself, the approach may feel narrow.

It is not a rare-vegetable or gourmet showcase

The site explicitly says it is not a "gourmet growers" site, and that it does not emphasize rare or oddball vegetables or types of vegetables. What it emphasizes is varieties that reliably deliver the best eating quality of whatever vegetable or fruit they are, and that can and will grow readily in a garden.

So the recommendations lean toward dependable, good-tasting versions of familiar crops rather than novelty or collector varieties.

It describes its method as data mining

Growing Taste makes no claim to special gardening expertise — it says that if the authors, with their "black thumbs," can grow something, anyone can. Where it does claim expertise is in what it calls data mining: extracting solid, useful information about home vegetable and fruit gardening from a large and mixed mass of truths, falsehoods, and half-truths.

That framing tells you what kind of source this is: a filter and aggregator of growing and flavor information, not a first-hand trial station or a formal research institution.

Who it suits, and who it does not

The site's stated climate focus is a moderate northerly climate with a somewhat short but rather warm growing season, and it names USDA Zone 4 to 7 as the range where the advice should be good. It adds that what grows well under those harder conditions will almost certainly grow well through most of the United States and Canada, and that the advice will probably still help in more extreme zones.

One practical note from the site itself: it recommends rotating a mobile device a quarter-turn for a better viewing experience, and its home page was updated for 2022 — worth keeping in mind if you are checking how current a specific page is.