What this site collects

USGrowersGuide.com (“we”, “us”, “our”) runs this site. It has no accounts and no server that sees what you type, so this policy is shorter than most — but the one thing that does leave your browser is set out in full below rather than buried.

1. Your ZIP code stays in your browser — except for analytics

When you enter a ZIP code, the lookup happens entirely on your device. The site downloads a small static file covering ZIP codes that share your first three digits and does the arithmetic locally. Your ZIP code is never sent to a server of ours to be answered, because there is no such server — this is a set of static files.

However: when a lookup succeeds, the ZIP code is sent to Google Analytics 4 as part of an analytics event, along with your hardiness zone and which weather station was used. That is a genuine disclosure and not a technicality. We use it to see which parts of the country the site is actually reaching, which is what decides what gets built next.

A ZIP code is coarse — it covers thousands of households — but combined with the IP address and the random client identifier that Google collects, it is more identifying than either alone. If that is not a trade you want to make, the opt-outs below all work.

2. What is actually recorded

The site sends 6 kinds of analytics event. These are the fields any of them can carry, and the list is generated from the code rather than written by hand, so it cannot fall out of date:

• from
• heat_limited
• host
• page
• percent
• reason
• risk
• season_state
• sowable
• station
• station_km
• tool
• zip
• zone

In addition, Google Analytics 4 collects what it collects on any site that uses it: your IP address, a randomly generated client identifier stored in a cookie, your approximate location derived from the IP, the pages you visit, and your browser, device and referring site.

Our host, Cloudflare, keeps standard server logs of requests — IP address, time, and the file requested — as any web host does. We do not read them for anything other than diagnosing whether the site is up.

Cloudflare also runs Cloudflare Web Analytics on this site, which is a separate thing from those logs. It adds a small script to each page that measures how quickly the page loaded and which page you came from, and reports it back to this site's own domain. It sets no cookie, does not identify you across visits, and is not used to build a profile of you. It counts page loads and how fast they were.

This site shows ads through Google AdSense. That is the most data-hungry thing on this page, and it is worth being plain about: Google and its advertising partners set their own cookies and read identifiers in your browser, use your IP address and what you looked at here to choose which ads to show you, and may combine that with what they know about you from other sites. We do not receive any of it — we are shown aggregate earnings, not who you are. We have no control over which advertisers appear.

3. The email sign-up bar

A bar at the foot of every page offers seasonal frost and sowing reminders. It is the only place on this site that collects anything you type about yourself, and it is entirely optional — dismiss it and every tool still works exactly the same.

If you enter an address and press sign up, three things are stored:

• email — the address you typed, lower-cased
• source_page — the path of the page you signed up from, such as /what-can-i-still-plant
• signup_context — which placement you used, currently always sticky-bar

The last two exist so we can tell which pages are worth writing more of. They record the page, never the query string — so your ZIP code is never attached to your email address, even though the tools put a ZIP in the address bar. That is a deliberate line: a ZIP alone is coarse, but a ZIP tied to a named contact is not.

The list is stored and delivered by systeme.io, based in France, and is used only to send those reminders. It is never sold, rented or shared. Every email carries an unsubscribe link, and unsubscribing removes you from the list.

The form posts to this site's own server, not to systeme.io directly, so no third-party script runs on the page and nothing about you is sent anywhere until you press the button. Dismissing the bar stores a single flag in your browser's local storage (usg-signup-dismissed) so it stays dismissed. That flag never leaves your device.

4. What is not collected

• No accounts, passwords, names, addresses or phone numbers.
• No email address unless you type one into the sign-up bar — see section 3 below. Nothing else on the site asks for one, and none of the tools require it.
• No payment information. Nothing here is for sale.
• No social media trackers. Advertising is a different matter and this line used to claim otherwise — Google AdSense and its partners do run here and do set cookies, which sections 5 and 6 cover.
• Nothing is ever sold, rented or shared with data brokers.
• No precise location. The site never asks for GPS and could not use it if granted.

4b. Links that earn us a commission

Some tool pages link to Amazon searches for equipment — row cover, shade cloth, seed-starting gear. Those links carry a tag that credits us if you buy something within about a day of clicking. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. It costs you nothing extra.

What that means for your data: clicking one takes you to amazon.com, which sets its own cookies and applies its own privacy policy, not ours. We are paid from Amazon’s own reports, which tell us what was ordered and what we earned — not who you are and not what you personally bought. Nothing about you is sent to Amazon by this site; the link is an ordinary link and nothing runs before you click.

Every link points at a search rather than a product we chose, because we have not tested any of them. Nothing on this site is ranked, ordered or worded to favour a purchase, and no commission has any effect on a date or a zone — those come from NOAA and the USDA and are the same whether you buy anything or not.

5. Cookies

The site itself sets no cookies. Google Analytics 4 sets its own to tell repeat visits apart, and Google AdSense and its advertising partners set theirs to choose and measure ads. Blocking all of them costs you nothing here — every tool works with cookies disabled, because all the calculation is local.

6. How to opt out

Readers in the EEA, the UK and Switzerland are asked first. That prompt is Google’s own certified consent tool, it governs the AdSense advertising and the Google Analytics 4 tag, and your answer is stored in your browser so you are not asked again on every page.

Readers in US states with privacy laws get an opt-out link rather than a prompt. It lets you refuse the sale or sharing of your data for advertising, and Google applies that refusal to the ads on this site.

⚠ That opt-out does not switch off the analytics. This site sends your ZIP code to Google Analytics 4 when you use a tool — section 2 says so — and that is a separate system from the advertising. If that is the part you want stopped, use one of the routes below; they work everywhere, for everyone.

Being straight about the rest of it: everywhere else, including Canada, nothing asks you at all, and analytics load shortly after the page does. The Cloudflare counter in section 2 sits outside all of this — it is not a Google tag. If you would rather not be counted, any of these works and none of them breaks the tools:

• Use any content blocker or a browser that blocks trackers by default.
• Install Google's own Analytics opt-out add-on.
• Block googletagmanager.com and google-analytics.com at your DNS or hosts file.
• Block static.cloudflareinsights.com the same way to stop the Cloudflare Web Analytics script in section 2. It sets no cookie, so there is no opt-out add-on for it.
• For ads, Google's own controls are at My Ad Center, which turns off personalised advertising across everything Google serves. Blocking pagead2.googlesyndication.com stops the ads here outright.

7. Your rights

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to know what personal information is held about you, to have it deleted, and to opt out of its sale or sharing. Under California law a ZIP code counts as personal information when it is combined with other identifiers, which is why it is disclosed so plainly above. We do not sell or share personal information as those laws define it.

There are still no accounts, so for anyone who has not subscribed we hold nothing that identifies them directly and could not look them up if asked. If you are on the email list, that changes: your address identifies you, and it is the key we can look you up by. Everything else on this site remains anonymous.

To exercise any of this:

• Stop the emails — the unsubscribe link at the foot of any email, which takes effect immediately and needs no reply from us.
• Be deleted entirely, or ask what is held about you — email [email protected] from the address you subscribed with, and we will remove the record rather than only stop sending.
• Analytics only — the opt-outs in section 6 stop collection at source, which is more effective than asking after the fact; email us if you want data already associated with your device deleted.

8. How long any of it is kept

The email list: your address and the two sign-up fields are kept until you unsubscribe or ask to be deleted. There is no fixed expiry, because a seasonal newsletter that forgot you every year would be useless.

Analytics: held by Google Analytics 4 under Google's own retention window, which Google sets and enforces rather than us. Server logs: kept by Cloudflare on their schedule, not ours.

Both of those are honest limits rather than evasions: they are systems we configure but do not operate, and quoting a number here that their settings did not match would be worse than pointing at where the number actually lives.

9. Children

This is a gardening reference and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 13.

10. Changes

If this policy changes in substance, the date at the top of this page changes with it. It is set by hand and not by the build, so it moves only when the wording does — a "last updated" that shifted every time the site rebuilt would say nothing about the policy.

Questions about any of this go to [email protected]. See also the terms of use and what this site is.