About PlantingWindow

Most “when to plant” pages give you a single mysterious frost date and a wall of filler text. PlantingWindow is built on a different premise: gardeners deserve the actual numbers — the published freeze probabilities at a named weather station near them, and crop offsets that trace to a university extension publication rather than to vibes.

The site is independent. It is not affiliated with, reviewed by, or endorsed by USDA, NOAA, the U.S. Census Bureau, or any university whose publications it cites. It sells nothing, has no accounts, and runs no third-party trackers.

What it does: resolves your ZIP code or city to official Census geography, reads NOAA 1991–2020 freeze normals from the nearest complete station, applies cited extension timing rules, and shows every assumption inline — station distance, normal period, probability levels, variety assumptions, and the sources themselves. The full recipe is on the methodology page, and every dataset version is on the sources page.

What it deliberately does not do: forecast this year's weather, promise frost safety, or generate advice beyond planting timing. When the data cannot support an answer — a PO-box ZIP with no geography, a desert valley far from any station, a climate where freezes barely happen — it says so plainly and points you to your county Cooperative Extension office instead.

Who publishes this

PlantingWindow is published and maintained by Bineyam Tsegaye. Questions, corrections and source disputes reach a person, not a form: see the corrections page.

The editor is not a Cooperative Extension agent and does not replace cited guidance with personal recommendations. The current climate and crop-source release was editorially reviewed on July 26, 2026.

How rules get on this site

Every crop rule follows the same path. A timing statement is located in a Cooperative Extension or land-grant university publication and quoted verbatim, with its institution, title, URL and access date recorded. The quote is then independently re-checked against the live page — that it exists word-for-word, that it refers to the right species, and that it genuinely implies the day offsets encoded from it. Rules whose sources give only a calendar date or a soil temperature are rejected, because this site's arithmetic is anchored to freeze dates and cannot express them honestly.

Rules that fail any of those checks do not ship. Where a crop a gardener would expect is missing a method, the page says which source is silent and why, rather than filling the gap with an estimate. Data files carry checksums and a validation suite that refuses to build when a citation is missing or a probability is out of order.

Sources are re-checked when the underlying datasets are refreshed. The current dataset versions and access dates are listed on the sources page.