About
What this site is
A free set of planting tools for US gardeners, built on published climate data. It answers the question you actually have — can I still plant this, will it survive here, when do I start — rather than the one that is easy to answer.
Where every number comes from
Two public sources, and nothing else.
- Frost dates — NOAA's 1991–2020 US Climate Normals. 7,125 weather stations publish usable freeze probabilities, and every result on this site names the station it used and how far away it is.
- Hardiness zones — the USDA's 2023 Plant Hardiness Zone Map, published per ZIP code by PRISM at Oregon State. All 40,502 US ZIP codes have one.
Nothing is estimated, averaged across places, or filled in. If the data does not cover you, the site says so instead of producing a plausible number.
What it refuses to do
These are the rules the whole thing is built around, and they are the reason some pages are shorter than a competitor's.
- Never invent a frost date. 7,108 ZIP codes have no weather station close enough to describe honestly. They are told which of two reasons applies — a PO box with no published location, or a genuinely remote place with the real distance shown — and given the tool that does answer them in full.
- Never substitute a nearby station silently. Every figure is attributed. If the nearest station is 40 km away, the page says 40 km.
- Never give a metro one hardiness zone when it has several. Los Angeles spans eight. Those pages show the split across zones rather than rounding everyone into the largest one.
- Always separate measured from judged. A freeze date is measured. Days to maturity and heat tolerance are conventional guidance. Pages that show both say which is which, and a judgement is never allowed to quietly overwrite a measurement.
What is here
- 4 tools covering the year — when to start seeds, when to sow again, what you can still plant, and what survives the winter. They run on 32 vegetables and 74 perennial fruits, nuts, berries and herbs.
- 388 metro area guides, each citing every weather station that serves it. 91 of those fall inside a single hardiness zone and say so outright; the rest show how the answer changes across them.
Everything is free, there is nothing to sign up for, and there are no ads. See the privacy policy for the one thing that does get collected.
Corrections
If a figure here disagrees with your own records, or a station is cited that looks wrong, that is worth knowing about — station names and IDs are printed precisely so a claim can be checked. Email [email protected].
USGrowersGuide is an independent project and is not affiliated with NOAA, the USDA, PRISM or Oregon State University. Those organisations publish the data; any mistake in how it is presented here is ours. For decisions that matter, check your state's cooperative extension service — see the terms of use.