About Frost Date Finder

What this site publishes

Frost dates and planting windows for every US ZIP code with a population above 2,000 — the last spring freeze, the first autumn freeze, the length of the growing season and the USDA hardiness zone, turned into a calendar of what to do when.

Why it exists

The underlying data is public and free, but it is published for analysts rather than for readers: bulk files, codebooks, and lookup tools that expect you to know the identifier already. This site does the matching and the arithmetic, then states the answer in a sentence at the top of the page.

Where the figures come from

Climate normals published by NOAA for 1991-2020, matched to each ZIP code by the nearest reporting station, and plant hardiness zones from the USDA.

Nothing here is estimated, modelled or generated. Every number traces to a published federal record.

What it is not

A normal is a thirty-year average, not a forecast. Any individual year can freeze two to three weeks either side of these dates, so check the actual forecast before planting out.

Who publishes this site

Frost Date Finder is published by ArtUp Labs, the trade name of Individual Entrepreneur Karpets A.V. (Artyom Karpets), Republic of Kazakhstan. It is a one-person operation: the same person writes the code that matches the federal records, checks the pages and answers the mail. There are no outside authors and no sponsored content.

The terms of use are on the terms page, and how the site handles data is in the privacy policy.

Corrections

If a page contradicts the official source, the official source is right and we want to know. Write to us from the contact page.