Affiliate & Advertising Disclosure
This page explains, in plain English, how The Garden Plot makes money — because a site that tells you to grow more of your own food owes you total honesty about the times it suggests you buy something.
What affiliate links are
Some links on this site are affiliate links. That means if you click one and buy something, the retailer pays us a small commission — typically a few percent of the sale. It costs you nothing extra. The price you pay is the same as if you'd gone to the store directly.
We participate in affiliate programs including Amazon Associates and seed and garden-supply programs through networks like ShareASale and Impact. When an article contains affiliate links, you'll see a short notice near the top of the page saying so.
Our affiliate policy (the part that matters)
Gardeners are thrifty people, and gadgets are this niche's original sin. So every affiliate link here follows three rules:
- Tested-first, never gadget-first. We link to tools and supplies that genuinely earn their place in a food garden — soil test kits, drip parts, hand tools — never novelty gadgets nobody needs.
- The numbers come first. Costs, spacing, quantities, and watering rates are stated plainly. If we can't justify a recommendation with specifics, we don't link it.
- We say when the answer is "spend nothing." Our guides regularly conclude that the cheapest option is your own compost, something you already own, or simply not buying the thing. No commission is worth the trust we'd lose pretending otherwise.
We only recommend products we would buy for our own beds, and our reviews name duds alongside winners. Affiliate relationships never determine our verdicts.
Display advertising
This site may display ads served through an ad network (currently set up for Mediavine Journey). These ads are how the site earns revenue from readers who never click a product link. We don't control which specific ads appear, but we choose networks with standards against deceptive or predatory advertising, and we keep ad placements from interfering with reading.
Sponsored content
If we ever publish a sponsored post or accept a sponsored newsletter placement, it will be clearly labeled as sponsored at the top of the content — and we'll only accept sponsorships for products we'd recommend unpaid.
Digital products
We sell our own low-cost guides (such as a first-season garden planner and a soil & compost workbook). These are our own products, priced to be genuinely useful rather than premium courses — if a guide doesn't save you visible time or money in the garden, we don't want your money for it.
Questions?
If you have questions about how we make money, or you spot something on the site that feels like it conflicts with this policy, we want to hear about it. Contact us at hello@thegardenplot.com and a human will reply.
Last updated: September 27, 2026.