Terms of use

Agreement

By using Safe to Plant you accept these terms. If you do not accept them, do not use the site. No account is required and nothing is signed, so using the pages is the whole of the acceptance.

What this site is

Safe to Plant publishes statistics derived from a historical climate record: the dates by which frost has typically ended and begun at a location, the length of the frost-free season, a hardiness-zone equivalent, and planting windows calculated from those dates. The method page sets out exactly how each figure is produced.

It is a reference work and general horticultural information. It is not professional, agricultural, commercial or safety advice, and it is not offered as a substitute for local expertise or your own judgement.

No warranty, and one warning worth reading

These are statistics, not forecasts. Every date on this site describes what happened across past decades at a grid cell. None of them predicts what this particular season will do. A frost can and will arrive outside every window shown here; that is what a percentile means, not a fault in it.

The underlying record is gridded, resolving roughly half a degree of latitude, so the figures describe a district rather than a garden. Cold air pools in hollows and drains off slopes; a walled town plot can run a fortnight ahead of open fields a mile away. Elevation, aspect, shelter, soil and the shape of your own ground can all move a real frost date well outside what this site shows for your town.

The site is therefore provided "as is" and "as available", without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including any implied warranty of accuracy, completeness, merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose or non-infringement. Data errors are possible: the source record has its own uncertainties, the crop timings are compiled from published guidance that varies by region, and software has bugs.

Do not use this site as the sole basis for a decision with money, a livelihood or safety attached — a commercial planting schedule, a crop insurance position, an infrastructure or engineering decision, or anything else where being wrong is expensive. For those, use your national meteorological service, a local agronomist, and your own records.

Liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, Safe to Plant and its operator are not liable for any loss or damage arising from the use of, or reliance on, anything published here — including lost crops, lost plants, lost profits, wasted seed, wasted labour, or any indirect or consequential loss.

Nothing in these terms excludes or limits any liability that cannot lawfully be excluded, and nothing in them removes rights you have as a consumer under the law of the country you live in.

Using the data

The frost percentiles, hardiness-zone equivalents and planting windows derived by Safe to Plant are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence. You may copy, adapt and redistribute them, including commercially, provided you credit Safe to Plant with a link to this site and indicate whether you changed anything.

That covers the figures. It does not cover the prose, the page designs, the stylesheet, the site's name or its logo, which remain the operator's and are not licensed for reuse.

Reasonable automated access is fine. Systematic bulk scraping of the whole site is not the way to get the data, and it costs the site real money in bandwidth: ask and an extract can usually be arranged instead. Any automated client should identify itself, respect robots.txt, and keep to a rate that does not degrade the site for readers.

Source licences

The upstream data carries its own terms, and using anything derived from it means respecting them:

• NASA POWER — daily temperature data, in the public domain. NASA asks to be cited; the footer of every page does so.
• GeoNames — place names, coordinates and populations, under CC BY 4.0, which requires attribution wherever the data travels.

Neither organisation endorses this site, has reviewed it, or is responsible for anything derived from their data here.

Acceptable use

Do not use this site to:

• break the law, or infringe anyone's rights;
• attack, overload, probe or otherwise interfere with the site or the servers it runs on;
• republish the figures in a way that misrepresents them — presenting a percentile as a forecast, or stripping the uncertainty from a date and stating it as a fact about a coming season;
• claim endorsement by Safe to Plant, NASA, GeoNames or the USDA that has not been given.

Advertising and external links

This site carries advertising, which is what funds it. Ads are served by third parties and are marked as advertising. They are not editorial, are not endorsements, and no advertiser has any influence over the figures or the words on this site. Any dealing you have with an advertiser is between you and them.

Links to other sites are provided for reference. Those sites are outside this site's control, and linking to one is not an endorsement of it or a guarantee of anything on it.

How advertising affects your data is set out in the privacy policy, which forms part of these terms.

Availability

The site is offered without any uptime guarantee. Pages, locations and crops may be added, changed or withdrawn at any time, and the figures themselves change when the pipeline is re-run against a newer climate record. A URL that works today is intended to keep working, but nothing here is promised as permanent.

Changes to these terms

These terms may change. The date at the top of this page is taken from the file itself, so it moves whenever the text does, and continuing to use the site after a change means accepting the current version.

These terms are governed by the law applicable where the operator is established, without displacing any mandatory consumer protection of the country you live in.

Questions about any of this: contact@safetoplant.com, or the contact page.