We are Rational Gardening

Our Founding

After more than 30 years as a software engineer, including 13 years as an engineering technical lead, I resigned from a job I loved. I had no real plan for what came next.

But there was something else in my life I loved: gardening. For more than 20 years, my wife and I had been growing a significant amount of our food in our backyard. I loved understanding how weather, soil, timing, and a hundred small decisions worked together to create the food we ate. So I went back to college to get a degree in horticulture and a degree in farm-to-fork.

Between college, home, and friends, I kept seeing the same situation play out. Gardeners have more information than ever—and still do not know how to solve their garden issues. It’s not the lack of information; it’s the information without the context of their particular garden.

Gardening is site-specific. Soil, sunlight, and water can vary from one yard to the next, yet most gardening advice is generic. It leaves the gardener wondering what matters for their specific situation. The result is a gardener who decides, “Maybe I’m just not very good at this.”

This is why I founded Rational Gardening. Our first product, Garden Advisor, understands the gardener’s location, plants, weather, soil, and current conditions. It turns all of that complexity into a few clear decisions: What needs attention today? What can wait? And why? Because a gardener should not have to become a meteorologist, soil scientist, plant pathologist, and project manager just to grow a tomato.

~ Mike Wood, Founder of Rational Gardening