Put the zone lookup on your site

If you write about gardening, your readers keep asking the same first question: which zone am I in, and when is my last frost? This is that lookup, free to embed, no account and no tracking script on your page.

A ZIP code box that returns a zone and frost dates

A reader types their ZIP code and gets their USDA hardiness zone, their approximate last and first frost dates, and a link to the full planting calendar for that zone. They can also pick a zone from a list if they already know it.

The zone data is derived from the 2023 PRISM Climate Group (Oregon State University) ZIP code files, aggregated to three-digit prefixes. It is not the official USDA map, and the widget is built to say so rather than imply more precision than it has. Frost dates are one representative pair per zone and will differ from any individual yard.

Planting advice depends on the reader's zone

"Set tomatoes out two weeks after your last frost" is good advice that means early April in zone 8 and the end of May in zone 4. A post that gives one date for everyone is wrong for most of its readers, and a post that says "check your zone" sends them off to search for it, and many don't come back. With the lookup in the post, a reader gets their zone and frost dates in the same paragraph as your advice and can apply it straight away.

The result links to a full planting calendar for that zone, with indoor-start, outdoor and harvest dates for every crop, so a reader who wants more than your post covers has somewhere to go without you building and maintaining a calendar of your own.

Try it

Copy this

Paste it wherever you want the lookup to appear.

Copy the snippet

The one thing we ask

Keep the credit line under the frame. It is the only thing we get out of this, and it is a plain text link rather than anything keyword-stuffed on purpose: a widget that quietly injects optimised anchor text into other people's sites is the kind of thing search engines are right to discount, and we would rather have fewer honest links than more manipulative ones.

Beyond that, use it as you like. No permission needed, on a personal blog or a commercial one. If you would rather not carry the credit, link to the planner instead and we will call it even.

Notes for whoever maintains the page

• The frame is 230px tall, which fits the widget at its largest state, so it does not resize.
• The max-width keeps it readable in a wide column. Drop it if you want full width.
• Links inside the frame open in a new tab, because a whole site inside a 230px box is unusable.
• Nothing is set in your readers' browsers by the frame: no cookies, no analytics, no service worker.