Privacy Policy

Last updated: October 5, 2026

GrowersGuide.ca ("we", "us", "our") is committed to protecting your privacy. This policy explains what information we collect, how we use it, and your rights.

1. Information We Collect

Information you provide: We do not require account creation. If you send us feedback, we store what you typed — your name, email address, the type you chose and your message — in a file on our own server, and email it to us as well; section 4 names the service that carries that email. If you ask us to cover a topic, we store less: the topic you typed, your email address if you chose to give one, and the time. That form has no name field and no type field, and nothing from it is emailed. If you subscribe to the newsletter, section 4 lists everything that is sent to our email provider alongside your address.

Automatically collected information: Our web server’s access log records the page requested, the time, your browser type, the page that referred you, and an IP address — but not yours. Because this site sits behind a content delivery network, every request reaches our server from that network, so the address the log captures is one of theirs, shared by many visitors at once. The paragraph below explains where your own address is and is not used. Faults are recorded in a separate error log. Comparable data reaches three analytics services: Google Analytics and Ahrefs Analytics, which we load on every page, and Cloudflare Web Analytics, which our content delivery network adds to every page itself — all three are described in section 3.

Network error reports: Our pages are served with NEL and Report-To headers. These ask your browser to report failed connections to this site — a dropped request, a TLS error — by sending a small report directly to a.nel.cloudflare.com, our content delivery network’s reporting endpoint. Successful page loads are not reported. We did not write these headers into our pages; the network adds them, and they are part of what passing through it means.

What can end up in our error log: The error log is for faults, but two faults would put more than a fault in it, and we would rather name them than let “error log” sound emptier than it is. If our connection to the newsletter provider is ever misconfigured, the failure is logged with the email address that could not be saved, so the signup is not simply lost; the provider’s own error response is logged with it. And when the spam decoy on the feedback form is filled in — which only automated submissions do — the network address the request arrived from is written to the log. That is the shared content-delivery-network address described below, not your own.

What Google Analytics receives beyond page views: We send Google Analytics custom events describing what you do here, not only which pages you opened. There are around nineteen kinds of event carrying about twenty-five different details between them, and the honest summary is that most things you do here that produce an answer or a click are described to Google. They include the text you type into our site search; the city, crop, province or hardiness zone you pick in a tool, and the answer the tool gave you; how much space, how much sun and what goal you told a planner; which FAQ question you expand; how far down a page you scroll; which outbound source link you follow, and to which site; your progress through the seasonal garden hunt; whether you printed or downloaded a chart; and — when you subscribe — whether you filled in the optional city field. It also includes every click on an affiliate product link, identified by the specific product. We do not attach your name or email address to any of it, but it is a great deal more than a page count, and a reader who assumed their shopping clicks stayed between us should know that they go to Google.

Cookies we set ourselves: We set two first-party cookies. PHPSESSID holds a security token that lets us confirm a form submission came from a page on this site, which is what stops other sites submitting our forms on your behalf; it expires when you close your browser. gg_rated_… is set only if you rate a page with the star widget — one cookie per page rated, named after that page, holding nothing but the value 1. It lasts one year and is readable by JavaScript on this site, and its only job is to stop the same browser rating the same page twice. Neither carries an advertising or tracking identifier, and neither is shared with anyone. The rating itself is stored on our server as a running average for the page, with nothing recorded about who voted. Both are separate from the third-party advertising and analytics cookies described in section 3.

We do not store your IP address with a form submission. We used to, and stopped in September 2026. The address we were storing was the shared one described above — it identified nobody and could not have been used to block anybody, so storing it achieved nothing and we removed it. Your own address is not a secret from us, and we would rather be exact about that than sound better than we are: our content delivery network passes it to us in a request header, and we use it in two places, both of which reduce it to a one-way hash first — the flood-protection counters and the spam-rejection log, both described below. We do not store it in readable form anywhere, and we do not keep it with your submission. Submissions recorded before September 2026 still carry the shared address that was stored at the time; you can ask us to delete your submission using the contact details in section 10, and section 5 explains what deletion does and does not reach.

Spam filtering, and what happens to a message we get wrong: Feedback our automatic filter classifies as spam is not emailed to us, and the form deliberately does not tell the sender it was rejected — a spammer told “rejected” simply edits and resends. It is written to a rejection log instead, holding the name, email address, type and the first part of the message, together with a one-way hash of the network address it arrived from. That log exists precisely so a genuine message wrongly caught can be found and answered, which is impossible if we discard it. If you wrote to us and heard nothing back, email us and we will look for it.

Flood protection: So that one sender cannot flood the four forms on this site that write something — newsletter signup, feedback, asking us to cover a topic, and rating a page — we count recent submissions in a small file named after a one-way hash of the network address they came from. The file holds timestamps and nothing else, and is deleted automatically a few hours later.

Site search: Search terms typed into the search box on this site are written to a log file on our server, so we can see what visitors look for and fail to find, and then write it. The log records the search text, the time, and how many results it returned — not who searched. The same search text is also sent to Google Analytics, as described above.

Weather, and what that costs you: Every page carries a weather strip, and it requests a forecast from Open-Meteo on every page load, for every visitor, without waiting for you to interact with it — including on this page. Like any request your browser makes to another company’s server, that reveals your IP address to Open-Meteo. By default it asks for Toronto. If you press the locate button and grant your browser’s location permission, your device’s coordinates are sent as well — to Open-Meteo for the forecast, and to OpenStreetMap’s Nominatim service to turn them into a place name. If you type a city into the strip instead, that city name goes to Open-Meteo’s geocoding service. Declining or revoking location permission stops the coordinates; the forecast request itself is part of how the page loads.

The city you choose in a tool: Where a tool asks for a city, that choice does reach us — it travels in the web address or the form submission, so it also appears in our server log — and it is sent to Google Analytics as described above. If you give us a city when you subscribe, it is stored with your subscription at our email provider as well, so a regional email can go to the right people. This is a city you picked from a list, not a reading taken from your device.

Browser storage: Some tools remember your last choices on your device, in two separate browser stores. Local storage, which survives closing the browser, holds the city you picked (gg_city), the weather strip’s city (gg_weather_city), the city on two individual tools (gg_ssvf_city, gg_stc_city), the crop on another (gg_succ_crop), whether you dismissed the newsletter bar (gg_sticky_v2), and your progress in the seasonal garden hunt (gg_hunt_v1). Session storage, which your browser discards when you close the tab, holds four markers noting that you have just submitted a particular calculator (gg_cisp_submit, gg_fc_submit, gg_rbed_submit, gg_seed_submit). Our server never reads either store — but one entry does leave your device: the weather strip reads its saved city on every page load and sends it to Open-Meteo’s geocoding service to look the place up. Clearing your browser data removes all of it.

2. How We Use Information

We use the information we collect to:

• Operate and improve the website
• Understand how visitors use the site, through the analytics described in sections 1 and 3
• Respond to inquiries you send us

Our advertising provider, Raptive, and the advertising partners it works with may collect and use certain data for advertising purposes, as described in section 3. Please note that your information may be processed and stored on servers located outside of Canada, where privacy laws may differ from those in your jurisdiction.

3. Cookies and Advertising

This site runs three analytics services. Google Analytics (GA4) is loaded through Google Tag Manager, and Ahrefs Analytics is loaded separately; both run on every page, including this one. The third is Cloudflare Web Analytics, and it is different in kind from the other two: it is not part of the pages we write. Our content delivery network inserts its measurement script into the HTML as the page leaves its network, on every page of this site in all three languages, so it reaches you whether or not our own code asks for it. It reports page views, referrers and page-speed measurements to us. We disclose it because it is served to you under our domain and it is our responsibility, not because we wrote the line that loads it. Google Analytics uses cookies to collect data about how visitors use the site, which is reported back to us in aggregate rather than per person. Section 1 lists what we send it. You can opt out of Google Analytics tracking by installing the Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on. That add-on covers Google Analytics only. Ahrefs Analytics is a separate script from a different company, which we use for aggregated page-view and referrer reporting; loading it reveals your IP address and browser type to Ahrefs, and we have not independently verified what else it collects, so we describe it as what it is rather than make promises on Ahrefs’ behalf. Its own terms are linked in section 4. Requesting a web font from Google Fonts, and passing through our content delivery network, also reveals your IP address and browser type to those companies — both are listed in section 4 as well.

GrowersGuide.ca displays advertisements served by Raptive. Raptive and its advertising partners use cookies and similar technologies to serve ads, which may be based on your visits to this site and other sites. Raptive shows a consent pop-up to visitors in Quebec and in other regions whose laws require one, where you can make your choices about advertising cookies. A “Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information” link appears in the footer of the site. You may also opt out of third-party vendor cookies via the Network Advertising Initiative opt-out page.

Advertising.

CMI Marketing, Inc., d/b/a Raptive ("Raptive") is a service provider of this Site for the purposes of placing advertising on the Site, and Raptive will collect and use certain data for advertising purposes. To learn more about Raptive's data usage, click here: https://raptive.com/creator-advertising-privacy-statement/

4. Third-Party Services

GrowersGuide.ca uses the following third-party services:

• Google Analytics — website traffic analytics (Google Privacy Policy)
• Raptive — advertising. Raptive places the ads on this site and works with advertising partners that use cookies to serve them. (Raptive Advertising Privacy Statement)
• Open-Meteo — weather forecasts and city lookups. Your browser contacts Open-Meteo on every page load, which reveals your IP address to them; it sends coordinates only if you grant location permission, and a city name if you type one into the weather strip. (Open-Meteo Terms)
• OpenStreetMap Nominatim — turns coordinates into a place name. Contacted only if you grant location permission, and receives those coordinates. (OSM Privacy Policy)
• Brevo — the mail our server sends does not go out from our server directly; it is relayed through Brevo. That means the name, email address and full message you type into the feedback form pass through Brevo on the way to our inbox, as do our own automated site alerts. This is separate from Systeme.io, which handles the newsletter.
• Cloudflare Web Analytics — a third website analytics service, added to every page by our content delivery network rather than by our own code. See section 3 and the Cloudflare entry below.
• Systeme.io — newsletter storage and delivery. Receives your email address, and stored alongside it: where on the site you signed up, which form it was, the city you gave if you gave one, the language you garden in, what you told us you grow, anything you wrote in the free-text “what would you like to see” box, and a flag recording that you asked for the planting calendar, which we keep so we can send it to the right people and which is never cleared.
• Pinterest — a “Save” button script loaded from Pinterest’s own servers on guide pages that carry a Pinterest-shareable image, and on four index pages that embed our Pinterest board. Loading it reveals your IP address and which page you are on to Pinterest. Our home page additionally displays pin images served from Pinterest’s own image servers (i.pinimg.com), so loading that page fetches those images from Pinterest too.
• Ahrefs Analytics — the second of the two analytics scripts we load ourselves, from a different company, on every page (Ahrefs Web Analytics)
• Google Tag Manager — the Google service that loads and manages our Google Analytics tag (Google Privacy Policy)
• Google Fonts — typefaces served from Google’s servers on every page; requesting a font sends your IP address and browser type to Google (Google Privacy Policy)
• Cloudflare — content delivery network, security, and a third analytics service. All traffic to this site passes through Cloudflare’s network before reaching our server, so Cloudflare processes your IP address and request details in order to deliver the page and filter attacks. Beyond that, it adds its own Cloudflare Web Analytics script to every page as the page leaves its network (see section 3), and it attaches the NEL and Report-To headers that ask your browser to send failed-connection reports to a.nel.cloudflare.com.

Some pages contain affiliate links to products. Clicking these links may result in a commission to GrowersGuide.ca at no extra cost to you. Affiliate links are disclosed where present.

5. Data Retention

Feedback and content requests stay in the file on our server until we delete them by hand. Nothing removes them on a schedule, and we would rather state that plainly than imply a tidiness we do not have — ask us and we will delete yours. The spam-rejection log is kept on the same terms and for the same reason: a wrongly-filtered message has to stay findable. Flood-protection files are deleted automatically a few hours after they are written. The site-search log is kept so we can review what visitors are looking for, which we do a few times a year. Our web server’s access and error logs are rotated and overwritten on a rolling basis by the server’s own log rotation. Analytics data is retained per each provider’s own default settings. Newsletter subscriber details are held at Systeme.io until the subscriber unsubscribes. Browser storage stays on your device until you clear your browser data, except the session-storage markers, which your browser discards when you close the tab.

Backups, and what deleting a record actually achieves. This is the part a retention section usually leaves out, so: the files described above are copied every night to a backup on the server, and the thirty most recent copies are kept, which is roughly thirty days. Our hosting provider also takes its own daily snapshot of the whole machine, on its own schedule and its own retention, which we do not control. So when we delete your feedback, your content request or your rejected message by hand, we remove it from the live file, and copies of it remain in those backups until they age out. We cannot surgically edit a backup archive and we will not claim otherwise. What we can promise is that the live record is gone, that nothing will restore it except a disaster recovery we would be doing for other reasons, and that the copies expire on the schedule above. The same applies to the site-search log, which is backed up on the same terms.

6. Newsletter Emails, Unsubscribing, and Our Mailing Address

When you enter your email address in any signup form on GrowersGuide.ca, you are consenting to receive gardening emails from us. This section is the detail behind that consent.

How to withdraw your consent: every email we send carries an unsubscribe link at the bottom. Clicking it stops all further email immediately and needs no explanation or account. If a link ever fails, email hi@growersguide.ca and we will remove you by hand. Withdrawing consent is free and takes effect right away.

Our mailing address:

GrowersGuide.ca, 7030 Woodbine Ave, Suite 500, Markham, ON L3R 6G2

Canada's Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL) requires both of these to be available to you when you give consent. Every signup form on the site shows a short consent line and links to this section, where the details and our mailing address are set out.

7. Your Rights (PIPEDA & Provincial Privacy Laws)

Under Canada's Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) and applicable provincial legislation, you have the right to access personal information we hold about you, correct inaccurate information, and withdraw consent for its use. To exercise these rights, contact our Privacy Officer at the address below. One limit, stated here rather than buried: a deletion we carry out removes the live record, but copies persist in the nightly backups and provider snapshots described in section 5 until they age out. We will tell you when your live record is gone; we cannot tell you that every copy is.

8. Children's Privacy

GrowersGuide.ca is not directed at children under 14 and we do not knowingly collect personal information from children. We use 14 rather than 13 because Quebec’s Law 25 sets the higher threshold for consent, and where two Canadian rules differ we would rather apply the stricter one to everybody than sort our readers by province.

9. Changes to This Policy

We may update this policy from time to time. The date at the top of this page reflects the most recent revision. Continued use of the site after changes constitutes acceptance of the updated policy.

10. Contact

Questions about this privacy policy or requests regarding your data can be directed to our Privacy Officer via our contact form or by emailing hi@growersguide.ca.

GrowersGuide.ca, Markham, Ontario, Canada