About Thin Air Harvest
What Thin Air Harvest covers, how the pages are sourced, and why the byline is the editorial team rather than a named expert.
Thin Air Harvest is a static reference for gardeners in the high, semi-arid West. The region in view is Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, and northern New Mexico, from the Front Range cities to mountain valleys and high desert towns. The site is about vegetables, fruit, soil, water, native and drought-tolerant plantings, weather protection, wildlife, and planting calendars. It is written for people who already live with a short or jumpy season and want decisions they can take to a seed order or a Saturday project.
What the pages are for
Each article is built around a decision: which tomato class is even worth attempting at a given elevation, whether gypsum belongs on your clay, how tall a deer fence has to be, which frost date to plant against. The category pages add the connective tissue, so a calendar is not stranded from the crop pages it depends on. The legal and editorial pages explain the limits of that advice.
The geographic range is deliberate. A single “Mountain West” voice that quotes only Denver will mislead a gardener in Gunnison, Logan, or Taos. Pages name elevations, stations, and publications, and they send you to the matching calendar instead of pretending one last-frost day covers the map.
How the writing is sourced
Numbers come from land-grant extension publications and public climate tables. The ones used most often are Colorado State University Extension, Utah State University Extension, Montana State University Extension, University of Idaho Extension, University of Wyoming Extension and the Wyoming State Climate Office, New Mexico State University, the Colorado Climate Center, NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information, and the National Weather Service. Plant discussion draws on those horticultural publications plus the Plant Select program, a collaboration of Denver Botanic Gardens and Colorado State University, and on Denver Botanic Gardens as a regional plant institution.
When a page gives a frost date, it names the station, the temperature threshold, and the publication. Medians are medians. A 1-in-10 late date is labeled as that, not as “the” last frost. If two extension documents disagree, as the Utah pages sometimes do between a campus station and a valley station, the article shows both and tells you why. Missing stations stay missing. Leadville, Estes Park, Durango, and Boise do not get an invented date because a neighboring town has one.
Variety names are handled the same way. A cultivar is mentioned because it is widely grown for a short season, because a named program released it, or because an extension bulletin discusses the trait. The site does not publish a ranked “top 10” from a trial it did not run.
Who writes it
The byline on every page is the Thin Air Harvest editorial team. The site does not invent a resident horticulturist, a personal biography, or a stack of reader reviews. Recommendations are tied to the cited publications and to horticultural practice those publications describe. Corrections are part of the job. If a station table is updated, or a page has misstated what a bulletin said, write to the contact address and name the page.
What this version does not do
This version carries no affiliate links and no product recommendations with a commercial relationship. It does not sell plants, seed, or fences. It does not diagnose a plant from a photograph, and it does not replace your county extension office, a soil test, or the pesticide label. Advertising is not running. A placeholder for a future Google AdSense script is present only as an HTML comment, so nothing loads until an application is approved and the comment is removed on purpose. If advertising is turned on later, it will not change the frost tables or the plant lists. The editorial policy is the longer version of these rules.
The drawings are original. Ridge marks, frost timelines, bed sections, and cover diagrams are SVG files made for these pages. They are not photographs, and none of them is a portrait of a gardener, because this site does not invent a staff. If a number in a drawing and a number in the prose ever disagree, believe the prose and the source under it, then write.
Thin Air Harvest is a publishing project, not a nursery and not a public agency. The agencies linked in the sources are the authorities. This site is a careful reading of them, organized for the person holding the hose.