How We Test & Review

Hey, this is Sage from the homegrownnook team. You’re here because you want to know whether our recommendations are actually worth your time — and that’s exactly the right question to ask.

There are a lot of plant blogs out there that churn out “best of” lists based on nothing but a product page and an AI prompt. We don’t do that. Here’s exactly how we work, so you can decide for yourself whether to trust what we say.

Who We Are

homegrownnook is a small editorial team that grows plants in real homes — windowsills, rental balconies, and dim corners of real living rooms. We’re not commercial growers, and we don’t have a greenhouse. We’re regular people who kill plants, fix our mistakes, and write down what actually works.

When we recommend a product, it’s either because we’ve used it ourselves or because we’ve read hundreds of verified buyer reviews about it. Never both guessed. Never sponsored.

Two Types of Recommendations

Every product recommendation on this site falls into one of two categories. We mark them clearly in every article.

Tested by Us (tested: true)

For the products we use in our own homes, we buy them with our own money and test them over a period of 2–4 weeks minimum. During that time we pay attention to:

How it feels in real use (not just unboxing)
Whether it holds up after regular use
Where it actually falls short
Whether the price matches what it delivers

We take our own photos, note our own frustrations, and we don’t edit out the parts that disappoint us. If a product is good but has a flaw, we’ll tell you what the flaw is.

Based on Buyer Feedback (tested: false)

For products we haven’t personally tested — which covers most of the roundups on this site — we do a deep-dive into real customer experiences before we write a single word. Our research process:

Read verified purchase reviews — we go through at least 100 verified buyer reviews per product, focusing on the most recent and the most critical (the 1–3 star reviews tell you more than the 5-star ones).
Cross-check with community discussion — we look at what Reddit communities like r/houseplants and r/gardening actually recommend, and what they complain about.
Note consistent patterns — if 30 different buyers say the same thing (“the handle snapped after a month”), that’s not a fluke; that’s a real problem we need to tell you about.
Compare against alternatives — we don’t review products in isolation. We look at what else is in the same price range and who does it better.

When we write about these products, we say things like “buyers consistently report…” or “according to verified reviews…” — never “we tested this” if we didn’t.

How We Pick What to Review

We start from the problems real plant owners actually have. Our product pipeline comes from:

Questions people ask on Reddit and gardening forums
The complaints we see in Amazon’s 1–3 star reviews
What our readers email us about
New products that show up in Amazon’s “New Releases” for plant and garden categories

We skip products that are brand new with no reviews — there’s not enough real-world data to recommend them responsibly. We also skip products where the review pattern is suspicious (too many 5-star reviews in a short window, or reviews that all sound the same).

How We Score

We don’t give products a single fake number. Instead, we break each recommendation down into the dimensions that actually matter for that product category:

Durability — does it last longer than a season?
Ease of use — does it work for a beginner, or do you need to be an expert?
Value — does it deliver what you’d expect for the price?
Fit — is it actually right for your situation (small apartment, low light, hard water)?

You’ll see these broken out in every comparison and roundup we publish.

How Often We Update

We review our recommendations every six months. That means:

We check whether the product is still available
We look at whether buyers are reporting new problems that weren’t there before
We swap out products that have declined in quality or been replaced by better options
We update the prices and specs you see

You’ll always see a “Last updated” date at the bottom of every recommendation article.

Our Independence

We do not accept free products from manufacturers or brands in exchange for reviews. If a product shows up in our house, it’s because we bought it or chose to test it.
Some links on this site are affiliate links. If you buy through them, we earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. This helps keep the site running.
Our recommendations are never influenced by commission rates. We’d rather send you to the $15 trowel that works than the $40 one that pays us more. You can read our full affiliate disclosure for the legal stuff.

Questions?

If something in a review doesn’t match your experience, or if you’ve tested a product and want to tell us about it, reach out via our contact page. We read every message, and real reader feedback is how we keep our recommendations honest.

— The homegrownnook Team