About GroundGuide

GroundGuide is a free, open knowledge commons for documenting place-based land observations — plants, practices, and the conditions that shape them, recorded by people on the ground.

All contributions are released to the public domain under CC0 1.0. No ads, no paywalls, no data selling. Just knowledge, shared freely.

A lot of practical knowledge about land lives in memory, in conversation, in practice — in the hands of the people working it. Gardeners, farmers, foragers, homesteaders, land workers. Most of it never gets written down. When it isn't passed on, it disappears.

At the same time, the generic advice that fills the internet is written for somewhere else. What grows, what fails, what lasts — these answers are local. They depend on your soil, your climate, your altitude, your season. The most useful knowledge about a piece of land has always come from the people standing on it.

GroundGuide exists to make that knowledge easier to record and easier to find. A place to document what you observe on the land — any land you have lawful access to — so that someone working similar ground somewhere else in the world can learn from it. Not theory. Not product recommendations. Just direct observation, tied to a real place, shared openly.

Traditional and ancestral practitioners are welcome here, and their contributions are treated with the same care as anyone else's. GroundGuide is not positioned as an archive of any one tradition — that work belongs to the communities it comes from. What GroundGuide offers is a shared commons where anyone who has spent time on the land can add to a larger, place-anchored picture.

The people standing on the land are the ones who know it best. This is for them.