Toolshop/Garden consultations
A grower walks your yard with you - or your greenhouse, or the grow tent in the basement. We read the soil, the water, the light and the nutrients, and you get a written plan for this season, dated to the Gallatin Valley rather than to a seed packet printed in Ohio.
One full on-site consultation every 12 months, included with the plan. Beds, lawn, greenhouse or grow room - same visit, no trip charge inside the service area.
Not a subscriber, or not sure yet? The 30-minute intro visit is free for anyone in the valley.
Two minutes on the form below: where you are, what you grow, and what went wrong last year. I reply with a couple of dates.
60 to 90 minutes on site. Outdoors that is soil in the hand, a look at the water and sun through the day. Indoors it is a meter in the canopy, the reservoir, and what the EC and pH have been doing.
Amendments, watering, varieties and a planting calendar for your address - with the numbers saved into your Bizon account so the calculators already have them.
Valley soils here are alkaline and often calcareous, which changes what your fertilizer is actually able to deliver. We read your soil test if you have one, decide whether to order one if you don't, and pick amendments that work at pH 7.8 instead of the ones the bag assumes.
Most Bozeman-area water is hard and carries a lot of bicarbonate, and most home gardens are watered on a timer that was set once. We look at how much you are applying, how often, and whether drip would do it with half the water.
A frost-free window that often runs late May to mid-September doesn't leave room for a mistake in the schedule. What to start indoors, what to direct sow, and where row cover, low tunnels or a wall-o-water buys you the three weeks that make tomatoes possible.
Light is the whole game indoors, and in a Bozeman winter it is the only game. We size the fixture to the footprint, set a photoperiod and a DLI target that suit the stage, and get temperature, humidity and VPD into a band where the plant transpires instead of stalling. February seed-starting under a shop light counts here too.
Where the sun actually lands through a season at this latitude, how high a raised bed needs to be over compacted fill, spacing that isn't a guess, and what to put on the windy side of the yard.
The pressure here is specific and so is the answer. Fence heights that hold, what is worth netting before a July hailstorm, and which of the sprays and repellents are worth your money.
Bluegrass and fescue on a realistic watering rate, a nitrogen program that doesn't run the lawn into summer stress, and the iron chlorosis that turns maple and raspberry leaves yellow between green veins all over this valley.
Deep water culture, ebb and flow, drip, or a flood tray under a bench. We look at the reservoir, set an EC and a pH that match the crop and the stage, and build a feed and top-off routine that survives a busy week. The calculators behind all of it sit on your account.
Gardening at 4,800 feet in southwest Montana is not gardening with a national planting chart. We sit in USDA zone 4b to 5b depending on where in the valley you are, the season is short at both ends, the sun is hard at this elevation, and a hailstorm can take a garden down in ten minutes in July.
The soil is its own conversation. Much of the valley floor is a silt or clay loam sitting on alkaline, lime-rich parent material, and new subdivisions are frequently built on scraped, compacted fill with a few inches of topsoil spread back over it. A generic "add lime and compost" recommendation is, here, half wrong and half beside the point.
Indoors is a fair answer to a season this short, and it brings its own local wrinkle: the same hard, alkaline tap water that suits a lawn fights you in a recirculating reservoir, where the bicarbonate walks pH back up for days after you adjust it. Knowing that before you buy an RO unit, or instead of buying one, is worth a visit on its own.
That's what a walk-through is for. Advice that fits your address, from someone who grows in the same dirt and manages the Plant Growth Center at Montana State University. More about who you'd be meeting.
On-site visits across the Gallatin Valley and the drive either side of it:
Outside that circle? A video consultation covers most of the same ground - say where you are on the form and we'll sort it out.
Free
30 minutes, anyone in the service area, no account needed. Enough to find the thing that's actually holding the garden back.
$30/yr plan
60 to 90 minutes plus the written plan, once every 12 months, free with Homeowner / Gardener. The rest of the toolshop comes with it.
See the planQuoted
A full design, a season of coaching, or a build-out gets a quote after the intro visit - once we both know what the work is.
Tell me where you are and what you're working on. I'll come back with a couple of dates, usually within three to four business days.
The first visit is free. Anyone in the service area gets a 30-minute intro visit at no charge, and Homeowner / Gardener subscribers get one full consultation a year included with the $30 annual plan. Larger projects are quoted after the intro, once we both know what the work involves.
One full on-site consultation per 12 months, plus the whole Bizon toolshop with the free tier's save limits removed: unlimited soil and water tests, unlimited log entries, unlimited custom plants, every Native Plant Finder match and two sites to track separately. The plan is $3 a month or $30 a year.
A full visit runs 60 to 90 minutes on site, depending on how much ground there is to walk. The free intro visit is 30 minutes. The written plan follows within a few days, and the numbers behind it are saved into your Bizon account so the calculators already have them.
No. Bring one if you have it and we will read it together, since a report is worth more than any amount of guessing. If you do not have one, part of the visit is deciding whether a test is worth ordering for your yard and which one to ask for.
March and April are the most useful, because there is still time to change the plan before anything goes in the ground. Mid-season visits are good for troubleshooting a crop that is struggling, and autumn visits are the right time for soil work, garlic, bulbs and planning next year while this year is still fresh Indoor and hydroponic visits are not seasonal at all - book those whenever the room is running.
Yes, and it is a good use of a Montana winter. Grow tents and basement rooms, greenhouses, and hydroponic systems from deep water culture to ebb and flow to drip: fixture sizing and DLI, photoperiod, temperature, humidity and VPD, reservoir EC and pH, and a feed schedule you will keep up with. Indoor visits run year-round, since nothing about them waits on the weather.
Yes. The service area covers the Gallatin Valley - Bozeman, Belgrade, Four Corners, Gallatin Gateway, Manhattan and Three Forks - plus Big Sky and Livingston with the Paradise Valley. Outside that, a video consultation covers most of the same ground.
Yes. Lawns, fruit trees, berries, perennial beds and native plantings are all fair game, and all of them have Bizon tools behind them. Iron chlorosis on maples and raspberries and over-watered bluegrass are two of the most common things found on a Bozeman walk-through.
Before the visit, the tools are free to poke at. Start with a soil test reading or a watering rate and you'll have better questions ready when I turn up.