Decide what to plant and protect today
Start with your location, then choose the garden decision you face: tonight's cold, hydrangea pruning, soil readiness, seedling acclimation, planting timing or watering. Each tool has different evidence and shows where uncertainty remains.
Open a tool below, or add a city or ZIP to carry your place into the related checks.
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Twelve distinct gardening decisions
Frost Dates & Freeze Risk
See NOAA spring and fall freeze climatology, current NWS cold risk, hard-freeze context and station-distance confidence.
Planting Calendar
Translate the freeze anchor into a full-season crop plan with start, transplant, direct-sow and succession windows.
Should I Cover My Plants Tonight?
Crop-specific protection, harvest and container-moving guidance from the next overnight NWS forecast. An actual decision, not just a frost date.
Garlic Planting Window
Is your bed cool and workable enough for autumn garlic? Combine season, measured soil temperature and NOAA first-freeze context without inventing a soil-freeze date.
Too Late to Plant Tulips?
Make a soil-based decision for tulips, daffodils, crocuses, hyacinths and ornamental alliums, including prechilling cautions.
Will My Tomatoes Ripen Before Frost?
Check fruit maturity against the seven-day NWS cold forecast. Know when to leave fruit growing, pick mature-green tomatoes, or ripen indoors.
Should I Dig Up My Dahlias?
Use USDA zone, foliage damage, winter drainage and forecast cold to choose lifting, storing, or careful in-ground overwintering.
Too Late to Plant a Cover Crop?
Compare winter rye, oats, radish, legumes and buckwheat. The right fall planting window depends on crop biology and how much growth remains possible.
Should I Prune My Hydrangeas Now?
Old wood versus new wood changes everything. Identify panicle, bigleaf, smooth, oakleaf or reblooming types before cutting next year’s buds.
Is My Soil Warm Enough to Plant?
Measure your seedbed and select a vegetable. Check germination thresholds, muddy soil and frost risk instead of mistaking warm air for warm ground.
Can My Seedlings Go Outside Today?
Use your hardening-off day, crop type and local forecast to balance sunshine, wind, cold nights and transplant timing.
Garden Water
Combine NWS evapotranspiration and rain, USDA soil context, crop stage and your own irrigation history into a water-today decision.
Why “last frost date” is not a deadline
Freeze climatology describes historical risk, not a guarantee that cold weather is finished. The frost tool keeps historical probabilities separate from the current NWS forecast so a warm spring or late cold snap does not disappear inside an average.
Why hardiness zone is a different question
USDA Plant Hardiness Zone is about perennial winter survival. It is useful context, but it is not a local last-frost date and should not be used by itself to schedule tomatoes, beans or lettuce.
Crop biology changes the planting answer
Cool-season crops can often tolerate conditions that would damage warm-season crops. The planting tool applies crop-specific rules to the local freeze anchor instead of giving every vegetable the same date.
Watering is not a fixed inch-per-week rule
Recent rain, evapotranspiration, rooting depth, crop stage, soil water-holding capacity, raised beds, containers, mulch and your own irrigation all change the answer. Garden Water keeps those inputs separate and shows uncertainty instead of pretending weather alone measures soil moisture.
Michigan gardeners get the deeper local tools
For Michigan-specific planting and freeze information, check Michigan frost dates and the Michigan planting calendar, or browse the Michigan & Great Lakes tools. This national hub stays broad rather than cloning those pages.