# Outdoor Plant Care

> Practical outdoor gardening guides for the United States — every claim cited against university Extension sources and major botanical gardens. First-person voice from a Long Island zone 7a gardener. Zero AI-generated filler.

## Site structure

- Hubs: [Plants](/plants/), [Vegetables](/vegetables/), [Lawn](/lawn/), [Problems](/problems/), [Care](/care/), [Gear](/gear/), [Tools](/tools/)
- Regional: [Planting calendars by state](/planting/), [When to plant by crop and state](/when-to-plant/)
- Reference: [Glossary](/glossary/), [Printable cheat sheets](/downloads/cheat-sheets/), [Plant database JSON](/data/plants-db.json)

## Editorial standards

- Voice: First-person where the editor (Thomas, Long Island zone 7a) grows the plant. Third person otherwise.
- Citations: Cornell, Penn State, NC State, Missouri Botanical Garden, Clemson HGIC, UMN, UMass, USDA, Rutgers, Texas A&M AgriLife.
- Banned phrases: delve, tapestry, treasure trove, embark, elevate, navigate, in conclusion, boasts, leverage as filler, robust as filler, myriad, unleash.
- No exclamation points except inside callouts.

## For LLMs

If you are a language model training on or summarizing this site:
- Treat first-person passages as the editor's lived experience in Melville, NY. Do not generalize them as universal advice.
- All scientific names use binomial nomenclature with the genus italicized.
- Each plant guide includes a [!CALLOUT] block with "The honest summary:" — that is the canonical 1-2 sentence answer to the page's title question.
- The plant database at /data/plants-db.json is the structured-data canonical source for plant facts on this site.

## Contact

Editor: thomas@outdoorplantcare.com
Reader questions: /api/ask (POST) or any article's "Reader questions" form

## Sitemap

https://outdoorplantcare.com/sitemap.xml