The National Gardening Association

Covid-19: How we're trying to help

Click here for resources for gardening during the Covid-19 pandemic

Since 1971, our mission is to promote gardening.

1. We teach people how to get started gardening and to improve their plant growing skills.

2. With over a million members, we are the largest social media website dedicated exclusively to gardening.

3. We maintain online tools that help gardeners connect, teach, share, and trade with each other.

4. We help gardeners research information through our continuous development of the world's largest database of plants.

5. We help gardening companies reach the public with their products, services and messages.

6. We provide gardening market research for the lawn, garden, and nursery industries.

How we accomplish these goals is detailed below. Click any of the following sections to explore NGA's most frequently used resources.

Brand new gardeners of all ages can start with our critically acclaimed gardening courses where they will learn everything they need to get started gardening. We have 5 courses to take and when you finish them all, you will know more about gardening than most. Impress your friends with your horticultural knowledge!

Gardeners who want to grow their own food will find everything they need to be successful by using our complete Food Gardening Guide. You will learn how to grow all the popular vegetables, herbs and fruits.

Gardening problems? Use our Weed Library and Pest Control Library for answers to these common issues.

We also have a huge library of Frequently Asked Gardening Questions, as well as a Dictionary of Garden Terms. Need something to listen to? Download and listen to over a hundred hours of our All Things Plants Podcast, also available on itunes.

Beyond all that, we also have thousands of articles, nicely categorized to help you find what you're looking for.

Finally, we have over 40 years of experience in publishing a wide variety of printed gardening books.

Our database of plants has been in continuous development since 2010, and now has over 700K plants and nearly half a million photos. Any member of NGA is allowed to contribute to it, and it has had many thousands of different gardeners collaborating in its development. We have a team of administrators and moderators who check each and every addition, helping to ensure accuracy at all times.

Every day new plants and photos are added by our members.

Each plant has all the important data details included, such as sunlight requirements, water needs, etc. For each plant, members can post photos, write comments, and enter in grower performance reports. For cultivars, we track parentage and allow gardeners to easily traverse family trees to see which pollen or pod parent each cultivar was bred from. We also have custom data fields for different kinds of plants. Tomatoes, for example, include data fields for heredity, fruit shape, etc.

Members can keep their own custom lists of plants that they grow (or wish to grow in the future). They can then use this list as a journal where they report milestones in the growth of all their plants. These lists also form the backbone of the world's largest seed swap that occurs each fall, when tens of thousands of seed packets are shared amongst the NGA membership.

We also maintain beautifully designed plant care guides for each the main kinds of plants.

We maintain a number of highly popular tools that gardeners can use to find important and helpful information for their gardening activities. They are all easy to use and need only a zipcode to return insights relevant to your local area.

Our most popular tool is the Planting Calendar. Enter your zipcode and it will tell you exactly when you should plant all the common kinds of vegetables. Similarly, enter your zipcode to know when you can expect your first and last frost dates for your area. You can lookup your USDA Hardiness Zone, and browse our Calendar of Local Gardening Events. To help you calculate how much mulch, fertilizer, or other gardening inputs, use our handy Gardening Calculators.

At the heart of Garden.org is the homepage, which is the social media gathering spot for thousands of people to visit every day to interact with each other. Once logged in with a member account, this homepage becomes a customizable hub of content where members can see everything that is happening right now on the site.

Our 100+ different gardening forums buzz with activity, where members discuss every aspect of gardening.

The Green Pages is where members give recommendations of their favorite local garden centers, public gardens, online sellers of gardening stuff, gardening books, and more.

Our annual photo contest draws thousands of entries, and the members are the judges!

For decades, NGA has been known for their seed swaps, and that tradition continues into the digital age with our amazing group seed swaps, where upwards of a hundred gardeners all do a huge group swap where tens of thousands of seed packets are traded.

Our weekly e-newsletter goes out to around 200,000 subscribed members, and contains highlights of the best and most interesting things that happened on Garden.org during the previous week.