Edibles · Seed Starting
Starting brassicas in October: a zone-by-zone window
Most growers give up on cabbage-family transplants after Labor Day. Our trials in Hood River and a reader network across Zones 3–9 suggest that's three weeks too early.
Issue No. 178 — Autumn Edition
The Magazine & Grower's Briefing
Long-form horticulture, rigorously reviewed. Every article in this issue has passed through 2.3 certified horticulturists, been photographed in our Hood River trial garden, and refreshed against the last 14 months of peer-reviewed research — so the advice you read on a Tuesday still holds come planting day.
Cover Story · Long Read
The Honest Case for Heirloom Tomatoes
After six seasons of side-by-side trials — 47 cultivars, 1,840 plants, three climate zones — our horticulture team weighs flavor, disease pressure, and the slow disappearance of seed lines our grandparents took for granted.
Read the cover story →From the Editor's Desk
A note on what changed in this issue
Welcome to Issue 178. We took the unusual step this quarter of putting tomatoes on the cover not because they are glamorous — they aren't, not in October — but because in our annual reader survey the single most-asked question was some variation of: "why does my Brandywine split right before I pick it?"
Mira Halloran's cover piece answers that, and twenty other tomato questions we hadn't thought to ask. As always, every page here has been read twice by a certified horticulturist and once more against the last fourteen months of horticultural literature before it reached you. If a fact has shifted since we first published a piece — and they do, sometimes within a season — we'll show you the diff in the margin. That is the only honest way to publish a gardening magazine in 2024.
Subscribers to the weekly Grower's Briefing will find the companion piece in your inbox this Sunday: a one-page checklist for putting the garden to bed in USDA Zones 4 through 9, keyed to your last frost date. As ever, if a piece here helps something survive the winter that wouldn't have, write back and tell us. Those letters are the fuel.
Eleanor Vance
Editor-in-Chief, Trubus Magazine · Master Gardener (OSU Extension, 2011)
In This Issue
The latest reviewed articles from the Trubus desks
Four new pieces across edibles, perennials, soil science, and regional gardening — every one fact-checked against the last fourteen months of horticultural research.
Perennials · >Propagation
When to divide hostas (and why most guides get it wrong)
The conventional "divide in spring" rule fails in three of our four trial climates. Here's what 312 reader-submitted observations actually show.
Soil Science · Trubus Soil Lab
What 6,200 member soil samples taught us about backyard pH
Six years of the Trubus Soil Lab program, mapped: where North American gardens run acid, where they run alkaline, and the three amendments that move the needle most.
Regional · Pacific Northwest
Putting the PNW garden to bed without smothering it
A wet-mild autumn is not a free pass. A region-specific checklist — what to cut, what to leave, what to mulch, and when to stop watering entirely.
Every Sunday morning for the last six years, the Briefing has been the one email our 217,000 subscribers actually open before coffee. It's the article we wish we'd had ten years ago, sent before the workday begins, with a single thing to do in the garden that week.
By the Numbers
The editorial backbone behind every article and every Briefing
Generic gardening content is easy to publish and quick to forget. Trubus is built like a research magazine: slow to publish, fast to update, honest about what we don't know. Here is the proof.
2.3
Horticulturists review every article on average before publication — degreed staff, Master Gardeners, and a PhD-led editorial board.
14mo
The update cycle for every piece in the archive. If the science moves, the article moves with it — the date at the top tells you when.
8,700+
Original long-form horticulture articles published since 2009 — every one hand-edited, none generated, none syndicated.
94%
Of surveyed members report successfully growing a new plant variety after following a Trubus care guide (n = 4,210, 2024 survey).