About ZoneFig
Garden advice fails when it ignores where you actually live. ZoneFig is built around your USDA hardiness zone and local freeze dates.
What we do
We turn real climate data — USDA Plant Hardiness Zones and state and county extension freeze-date normals — into actionable, printable plans: planting calendars, lawn schedules, pest treatments, watering and fertilizer math, tool kits, and project budgets. The site covers gardening from the soil up: what to sow and when, what is eating it, how much water and food it needs, what it will cost, and how the built half of the yard interacts with local zoning.
Everything is organized around location rather than around a generic national answer, because almost nothing in gardening is truly national. A planting date, a grass species, a pest pressure level, and a watering requirement all change with where you are, and a recommendation that ignores that is not merely imprecise — it can actively cost you a crop.
Why tools, not just articles
Generic how-to-garden content is easily answered by an AI overview: a paragraph explaining what a hardiness zone is, or when to water a tomato, satisfies most readers completely. A plan that changes with your state, your crop, your bed size, and your inputs — and that you can print and take outside — is a different kind of thing. It cannot be summarised in a snippet because the answer depends on numbers only you have. Every guide on ZoneFig therefore embeds a free interactive tool, and every tool ends in something printable.
That structure is also why the tools run entirely in your browser. There is no account, no login, and no server-side processing of what you type, which means a ZIP code, a garden size, or a fertilizer calculation never leaves your device. The trade-off is that we cannot recover your inputs for you — print the output if you want to keep it.
Data sources and how we handle uncertainty
Hardiness zones follow the 2023 USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Map, which defines zones by average annual extreme minimum winter temperature in 10°F zones with 5°F half zones. Freeze dates are typical 30-year normals published by state cooperative extension services, and they feed the frost-free season length used throughout the site. Spacing, days-to-harvest, nutrient, and cost figures come from published extension and reference material, and rain and climate defaults from NOAA/NCEI 1991–2020 normals where a location-specific value is not supplied.
Where a state spans many zones — which is most of them — we publish the bracket and say plainly that it is a range, rather than picking one figure and presenting it as the answer. Where a location-specific value is needed, the ZIP lookup resolves an address to a zone and a frost-date pair. And where a number cannot be verified against a source, we do not estimate it: the page says so and routes you to the authority. We would rather publish a named gap than a confident guess, particularly for anything a reader will act on outdoors.
Two honest caveats apply throughout. Every climate figure on this site is an average, and averages hide the years that cause trouble — a typical last frost date is a midpoint, so roughly half of years see a later one. And a ZIP code is a delivery area rather than a climate zone, so it cannot see your slope, your shade, your wall, or your frost pocket. Use the data as the correct starting point, then adjust from what your own site does.
Editorial standards
Guidance is framed around climate data and published extension recommendations rather than around fixed dates or single sources. We do not recommend specific product brands or carry affiliate placements that would influence a treatment recommendation, and we do not publish pesticide advice as though it were a substitute for a product label or a local regulation — the label and your local authority control, always. Where a topic depends on a jurisdiction-specific rule, we describe the typical pattern, name the authority, and give you the questions to ask rather than asserting an answer we cannot verify.
The yard and zoning material follows the same principle at a higher stakes level: state and local codes differ, overlays and covenants can be stricter than base zoning, and approvals are discretionary. Those pages describe typical standards and end in a printable list of questions for your planning or building department rather than a determination.
Corrections
If a figure on this site is wrong, the most useful thing you can send us is the page link plus the source that contradicts it. We correct against sources rather than against requests, which is the only way to keep a reference like this trustworthy. Data on this site is reviewed on the cycle of its upstream sources — annually for zone and fee-type material, and on revision for anything that changes mid-season.
Disclaimer
ZoneFig is educational planning guidance, not a substitute for local professional advice, pesticide labels, or regulations. Always read and follow product labels, confirm local rules with the authority that sets them, and check a short-range forecast before acting on any date this site suggests. See the Terms of Use for the full statement, and the Privacy Policy for what the site does and does not collect.