1. Agreeing to these terms
By opening this website you accept these terms and the Privacy Policy, which is part of them. If any of it does not suit you, the remedy is simple and costs nothing: stop using the site.
2. Who runs this site
The Usual Good is a personal gardening journal written and operated by Heather Brannon in Asheville, North Carolina, United States. "I", "me" and "my" mean her. "This site" means theusualgood.com and everything published on it. "You" means whoever is reading.
3. Who may use it
This site is intended for adults and is not directed at children. If you are under 18, use it with a parent or guardian's involvement. By using the site you confirm you can form a binding agreement under the law that applies to you, and that you will follow the law where you are.
4. What you may do
None of the following needs my permission:
- Read anything here, for as long as you like.
- Link to any page. A plain link needs no permission and never will.
- Print or save a copy for your own use, or for someone you actually know.
- Quote a short passage with attribution to The Usual Good and a link to the page it came from, in the way ordinary quotation and fair use allow.
- Grow, cook, build or try anything described here, at your own risk and judgement.
5. What you may not do
Without written permission, please do not:
- republish an entry in whole or in substantial part, anywhere, in any language;
- copy the photographs, including cropping, filtering or otherwise altering them;
- use anything from this site to train, fine-tune or otherwise develop a machine learning or generative AI system, or scrape it for a dataset;
- run automated collection against this site — crawlers, scrapers, harvesters — except for a well-behaved search engine indexer that respects robots directives;
- present this material as your own, or imply that I endorse you, your site or your product;
- use any part of it in advertising, or in anything promoting a product or service, without my agreement;
- attempt to break, overload, probe or gain unauthorised access to this site or the servers behind it;
- remove or obscure a copyright notice or attribution;
- use this site for anything unlawful, or in a way that interferes with anyone else's use of it.
6. Copyright and ownership
Everything on this site — the writing, the photographs, the arrangement of it, the name "The Usual Good" and the design of these pages — is owned by me or used with permission, and is protected by copyright and other laws. Nothing here transfers any ownership to you.
Reading the site gives you a limited, personal, non-exclusive, revocable permission to use it as described in section 4, and nothing more.
7. Permission to republish
I am not difficult about this. Newsletters, community gardening groups, classroom handouts and local plant societies usually get a yes. Write to heather@theusualgood.com, say what you want to use and where it will appear, and you will get a straight answer.
Any permission given is limited to what was described, does not transfer copyright, and can be withdrawn if the material ends up somewhere other than what was agreed.
8. Anything you send me
If you email me, you keep ownership of what you wrote. By sending it you give me permission to read it, reply to it, and keep it as correspondence.
Occasionally a reader's note is worth quoting in an entry. If I want to quote you, I will ask first, and I will not use your full name, your email address or your location unless you tell me I may.
Please do not send confidential material, and do not send unsolicited ideas or pitches expecting them to be treated as secret. If you send an idea anyway, I am free to write about that subject without owing you anything — which is only fair, since it may already be on the list.
9. Not professional advice
This is one person writing about one backyard. Nothing here is professional horticultural, agricultural, nutritional, medical, veterinary, financial or legal advice, and reading it creates no professional relationship of any kind.
Growing conditions vary enormously — this yard sits at about 2,100 feet in USDA zone 7a, on clay, in a climate with wet summers. What works here may fail entirely where you are. Your local cooperative extension service knows your conditions and is generally free; where it matters, ask them rather than me.
10. Plants, identification and toxicity
Take this section seriously, because it is the one with real consequences.
- Never eat a plant identified from a photograph, including any photograph on this site. Images cannot reliably distinguish edible species from toxic look-alikes, and some of the common ones in these mountains are dangerous.
- Plants described here may be toxic to people, to cats and dogs, or to livestock, whether or not that is mentioned in the entry.
- Foraging carries risks that no blog post can manage for you. Learn from a qualified person in the field, use a regional guide, and when in doubt do not eat it.
- Gardening involves tools, ladders, sun, insects and chemicals. Handle any product according to its label — the label is the law — and take your own safety precautions.
- If you think someone has eaten something harmful, contact Poison Control or emergency services immediately. In the United States, Poison Control is 1-800-222-1222.
11. Home preserving and food safety
Entries sometimes describe canning, pickling and preserving at home. Improperly preserved food can cause serious illness, including botulism, which can be fatal and which you cannot see, smell or taste.
Anything written here about preserving is a description of what happened in my kitchen, not a tested procedure. Use current, tested processing times and methods from a competent authority — in the United States, the National Center for Home Food Preservation and your state's extension service — and follow them rather than anything you read in an entry here.
You are responsible for your own food safety, for checking allergens, and for the condition of your equipment. If a jar seems wrong, throw it out; nothing in a pantry is worth the risk.
12. Independence and disclosure
At the date of these terms this site runs no sponsored posts, no affiliate links and no advertising. Products get named only because they were used and had an opinion attached.
If that ever changes, the disclosure will appear at the top of the piece in plain language, before the part you came to read — not in small print at the bottom.
13. Accuracy and corrections
Entries are written as carefully as I can manage, and they will still contain mistakes: a misidentified plant, a wrong date, a bad recollection. Material may also go out of date without being revised.
Tell me at heather@theusualgood.com and the entry gets corrected, with a note saying what changed. That is the whole correction policy.
14. Links to other sites
Where an entry links somewhere else, it is because the link was useful at the time. I do not control those sites, and a link is not an endorsement of everything on them. What happens once you leave is between you and them, under their terms.
15. Availability and changes
This site is offered as it is, when it is available. It may go down, move, change, or have entries edited or removed, at any time and without notice. Nothing here is a promise of continuous availability, and no entry is promised to remain published.
16. No warranties
To the fullest extent the law allows, this site and everything on it are provided "as is" and "as available", without warranties of any kind, express or implied. That includes any implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title, accuracy, and non-infringement.
I do not warrant that the site will be uninterrupted, timely, secure or error-free, that defects will be corrected, or that the site or its server is free of harmful components. Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion of certain warranties, so parts of this may not apply to you.
17. Limitation of liability
To the fullest extent the law allows, neither I nor anyone connected with this site is liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost data, lost plants, spoiled preserves, property damage or business interruption, arising out of your use of this site or of anything you did because of it — whether the claim is framed in contract, tort, negligence, strict liability or anything else, and even if the possibility of such damages was known.
Where liability cannot lawfully be excluded, total liability for any claim relating to this site is limited to one hundred United States dollars (US$100).
Nothing in these terms excludes or limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be excluded. If you are a consumer, these terms do not affect your statutory rights.
18. Indemnity
You agree to indemnify and hold me harmless from any claim, loss, liability or reasonable legal cost arising from your use of this site, your breach of these terms, or your violation of anyone else's rights.
19. Ending access
Access may be blocked at any time, without notice, for anyone who breaches these terms — scraping the site, republishing entries, or attacking the server, for instance. Sections 6 and 16 through 18 survive the end of your access.
20. If anything is ever sold here
At the date of these terms nothing is sold through this site. There is no shop, no checkout and no order processing, and these terms cover reading and using the site only.
If a shop is ever added, separate terms of sale will be published before anything can be purchased, covering orders, prices, payment, shipping, returns, refunds and cancellation rights, along with an updated Privacy Policy. Those terms would govern any purchase; these ones would continue to govern everything else.
21. Changes to these terms
These terms may be updated as the site changes. The effective date at the top will change with them, and using the site after that date means the current version applies to you. If a change is significant, a note will appear on the front page for a while.
22. Governing law
These terms are governed by the laws of the State of North Carolina and the applicable federal law of the United States, without regard to conflict-of-laws rules. The state and federal courts located in Buncombe County, North Carolina are the agreed venue for any dispute, and both of us submit to their jurisdiction.
If you are a consumer resident in the United Kingdom, the European Economic Area or another place whose law gives you the right to bring proceedings locally and to the protection of mandatory local consumer rules, this section does not take that away from you.
23. General provisions
- Whole agreement. These terms and the Privacy Policy are the entire agreement between us about this site and replace anything said before.
- Severability. If a provision is held unenforceable, it is limited or removed to the minimum extent necessary and the rest stays in force.
- No waiver. Not enforcing a provision once does not waive it later.
- Assignment. You may not assign your rights under these terms. I may assign mine if the site changes hands, in which case the terms follow.
- No third-party rights. These terms create no rights for anyone other than you and me.
- Force majeure. Neither of us is responsible for a failure caused by something genuinely outside our control.
- Headings. Section headings are there to help you find things and do not affect interpretation.
24. How to reach me
Questions about these terms, permission requests, corrections, or a legal notice:
- Email: heather@theusualgood.com
- Written from: Asheville, North Carolina, United States
- Postal address: available by email where a written notice genuinely requires one
For a copyright complaint, include enough detail to identify the material and where it appears, and it will be dealt with promptly.