The BetterGardens research project aimed to explore how gardeners cultivate their gardens and by which factors their decisions are influenced. Furthermore, we investigated the outcomes of chosen management concepts on soil quality and biodiversity as well as on the quality of life of gardeners. The study was conducted in four interrelated sub-projects (A-D) by the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research WSL and the Research Institute of Organic Agriculture FiBL.