Most growers arrive with a crop in mind, not a framework. “How do I grow strawberries?” is the real front door — so this is where what you grow meets how it grows.
Pick a crop and you have set most of the conversation: what light it wants, how it feeds, when it flowers, what it fears. A crop profile pulls those threads together — but every one of them is one of the ten inputs seen through a single plant's needs, grown by one of the methods. Crops are the front door; Growing and Methods are the rooms behind it.
Start with the crop
A crop is a set of preferences across the same ten inputs every plant lives in. Strawberries want cool roots and steady calcium; tomatoes want high light and a careful nitrogen taper into fruit; basil wants warmth and will bolt if you let it flower. None of that is special agronomy — it is the ten inputs with this plant's numbers filled in, on a timeline this plant follows. Learn the framework once and every new crop becomes a matter of looking up its targets, not starting over.
Profiles, cultivars, and calendars
Three things make a crop knowable: a profile (what it wants, stage by stage), a cultivar choice (which variety fits your climate, market, and method), and a calendar (when to start, transplant, and harvest where you are). We are building per-crop profiles steadily; in the meantime the tools below already answer the timing and selection questions for nearly any crop, and the Library carries the recipes and references behind them.
Choosing and timing tools
Specialty & high-value crops
The crops a small grower actually makes a living on are often the specialty ones — cut flowers, microgreens, culinary herbs, hops, maple. They have their own tools and their own playbooks, and they live alongside the livestock, bees, and mushrooms in the big tent.