Who built this
My name is Lewis. I am a home gardener in Scotland. I am not a professional horticulturist, I have never studied botany, and I learned most of what I know the hard way: by getting it wrong.
For years I followed gardening advice I found online. Some of it worked. A lot of it did not. The problem was never that I was bad at growing. The problem was that the advice was not written for Scotland.
The problem with gardening advice
Most British gardening advice is written for the south of England. It tells you to sow in March and plant out in April. In much of Scotland the ground is still frozen in March and the last frost does not lift until late May. Follow that advice here and you lose weeks of growing time, or you plant tender crops straight into a cold snap and lose the lot.
Worse than the bad timing is the folklore. Crushed eggshells stop slugs. Carrots and onions protect each other from pests. Coffee grounds acidify your soil. I tried these things. They did not work. When I went looking for the evidence later I found that most of them had never been tested, and the ones that had been tested had failed. The RHS ran a trial on eggshells, bark mulch and wool pellets as slug barriers. None of them reduced damage. Garden Organic tested the carrot and onion companion claim. The results were inconsistent. But these remedies are still repeated on gardening sites as if they are fact, because nobody checks and nobody tells you when the check comes back negative.
I got tired of losing seasons to bad advice. So I built the site I wanted to find: one that tells you where the claim comes from, whether it has been tested, and what the test actually found.
How we work
Every factual claim on this site is checked against at least one authoritative source. Where a claim could cause real harm if it were wrong (sowing dates, spacing, soil pH, chemical controls), we require two. Where we cannot find a source, we leave the field blank and say so. A blank is honest. A guess is not.
Where sources disagree, we show you both sides rather than picking a winner. Where a claim has been tested and found not to work, we say so plainly. We do not bury the result behind a softer headline.
Our primary sources are the Royal Horticultural Society and the Met Office. We also use Garden Organic, Scotland's Rural College (SRUC), the Farm Advisory Service, and Teagasc. We never cite seed catalogues or content farms. We never cite a source we have not read on the page itself. Search snippets are not sources.
Tools no other Scottish site offers
We built five interactive tools because the information they give you should be specific to your garden, not generic to the UK:
- Frost Date Calculator: your local last spring frost and first autumn frost, derived from Met Office station records across 11 Scottish regional variants. Not a UK average. Your date.
- Planting Calendar: a 12-month visual sowing, planting and harvest calendar adjusted for Scottish regions. Colour coded and printable.
- Seed Spacing Visualiser: enter your bed size and see exactly where to place each plant. Counts your plants and estimates yield.
- Garden Myths: pick a crop and see which claims about it have been tested and what the tests found. Busted claims first, because that is what you came for.
- Crop Rotation Planner: a four year rotation plan across your own beds. Keeps soil healthy and breaks pest cycles.
Scotland first
Everything on this site is written for Scotland. Our sowing windows are calibrated to Scottish last frosts. Our pest notes flag where UK generic timing may not apply here. Our variety suggestions are honest about what has been tested in Scottish conditions and what is a UK trial we hope transfers. We never present a southern English result as a Scottish recommendation.
If you have found this site useful, or if you have spotted something that needs correcting, I would like to hear from you. You can reach me at hello@growscotland.co.uk.