Terms of Use

Last updated: October 5, 2026

By accessing or using GrowersGuide.ca ("the site", "we", "us", "our"), you agree to be bound by these Terms of Use. If you do not agree, please do not use the site. The disclaimers that matter most are in section 3, and sections 4 through 6 carry the rest of them.

1. Use of the Site

GrowersGuide.ca provides free gardening guides, planting calendars, calculators and climate datasets for Canadian gardeners. There is no account, no paywall and no fee. You may use the site for your own gardening, and you may reuse parts of it as set out below.

Our data tables, CSV downloads and embeddable widgets are free to reuse. That covers all ten of the compiled datasets on this site — the frost-date tables and the town frost dates, the growing-degree-day and frost-risk tables, the hardiness-zone comparison, the frost-free season-shift study, the cultivar-hardiness table, the crop growing-regions table, the gardening-data hub’s aggregates and the methodology page’s station registry — together with the CSV download that eight of the ten carry — the town frost dates are an on-page table with a suggested citation instead, and the methodology page’s station registry is on-page only. All of it is free to use for any purpose: articles, newsletters, research, classroom use, commercial work, or your own website.

Attribution is the condition, and how much it asks depends on the dataset. All ten ask you to credit “GrowersGuide.ca” and to point back at the page the data came from — as a link on nine of them, and in a suggested citation on the tenth. Eight of the ten also ask for a credit to the primary source — Environment and Climate Change Canada for the frost and degree-day normals, Natural Resources Canada for the hardiness zones, the named breeding programme where a cultivar rating comes from one — and three of those eight phrase it as a request rather than a requirement, or make it conditional on the context. The remaining two ask only for ours.

We would rather point you at the real statement than flatten that into a single rule, so: the statement attached to what you actually took governs, and it says what it wants. If you took the table off the page, read that page’s own “Use of this data” section. If you took a CSV, check for a Licence column inside it — one of them carries its licence that way, and where a file does not, its page governs. If you are going by a shorter summary elsewhere on this site, such as our contact page, the fuller statement on the dataset page is the one that counts. Where two of ours differ, the more specific one wins. On the nine pages carrying a machine-readable licence in their structured data, that page is exactly what it points at.

For a critical or commercial use, check the primary source directly rather than relying on our compilation. Two of the dataset pages say so in terms — the gardening-data hub and the frost-free season-shift study — and they are right to: what we add is the compilation, the choice of stations and the plain-language reading, not a warranty on the underlying figures. Each page names its source, and most of the climate datasets carry the ECCC Climate ID of the weather station behind each row, which is what you need to pull the original record.

The embeddable widgets at /embed/ carry the same grant. Garden clubs, forums, nurseries, seed companies and bloggers are welcome to embed them, and the condition is the one built into each widget: keep the visible credit link.

The per-city planting-calendar PDFs are yours to keep, print and hand out. There are 104 of them, covering 52 cities in English and in French, and this section’s silence on them until now was an oversight rather than a restriction. Print them, photocopy them, pin one to a noticeboard, hand them round a garden club or a classroom, email one to a neighbour — all fine. Credit GrowersGuide.ca if you reproduce one inside something of your own, and leave any credit line already on the sheet where it is. What we ask you not to do is rehost the file or offer it as a download of your own: link to the page instead, so the copy people get is the current one. Each PDF is built from the same ECCC normals as the rest of the site, so the attribution above applies to the figures on it.

Our written guides and articles are different. Quote briefly with attribution — a sentence or a short passage, credited, with a link — and you need no permission from us. Republishing a guide in full or in substantial part, or reproducing enough of one to stand in for reading it here, does need our written permission. Ask through the contact route in section 19; we answer.

Automated access. What a crawler may and may not fetch on this site is stated in robots.txt, and that file governs — it currently permits general crawling, including by AI crawlers, and nothing in these Terms withdraws that. We also publish llms.txt, but it is an index of what is here rather than a permission file: it carries no crawler directives — nothing that permits or forbids a fetch. What it does carry, on most of its dataset entries, is a one-line reuse note condensed from the dataset pages themselves — most of those notes are shorter than the statement they come from, and ask for less. Treat those as a summary of what those pages say, not as a separate grant, and read the page. What is not permitted is automated activity that degrades the site for other people (request rates heavy enough to affect service, or working around our rate limits), or automated republication of the written guides at a scale the paragraph above does not allow. Reading the site with a script is fine; mirroring it is not.

You also agree not to use the site for any unlawful purpose, not to attempt to gain unauthorised access to it or to any account or server behind it, and not to interfere with its operation.

If you break these Terms, we may block your access to the site, in whole or in part and without notice, for as long as we judge necessary. There is no account to close, so in practice that means blocking at the network or request level; it is a blunt instrument and we would rather not use it. It does not affect anything you have already lawfully downloaded under this section, and it is in addition to the narrower right in section 8 to refuse submissions from someone abusing our forms.

2. Who May Use the Site

The site is not directed at children under 14, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from children — the same threshold our privacy policy uses, and for the same reason: Quebec’s Law 25 sets the higher figure and we would rather apply the stricter Canadian rule to everybody than sort readers by province. If you are under 14, please use the site with a parent or guardian, and do not submit your email address or anything else about yourself.

3. Gardening Information Disclaimer

The planting dates, frost dates, growing guides and calculator outputs on GrowersGuide.ca are provided for general informational purposes only. Gardening results vary significantly with local microclimates, soil conditions, weather variation from year to year, and other factors entirely outside our control.

We do not guarantee that following our guidance will result in a successful harvest. Always exercise your own judgement, and consult local gardening resources, provincial extension services or Master Gardeners for advice specific to your situation. Sections 4, 5 and 6 carry the disclaimers specific to our tools, the weather strip, and plant toxicity; section 12 disclaims warranties for the site itself.

4. Calculator and Tool Accuracy

Our frost calculators, seed-starting calculator, spacing, soil, raised-bed, harvest and other tools combine published climate data with general horticultural guidance. They are intended as starting points, not definitive instructions.

Where the published data comes from. Frost dates and growing-degree-day figures are climate normals (1981–2010 / 1991–2020) published by Environment and Climate Change Canada. Plant hardiness zones are published by Natural Resources Canada, not by ECCC and not by us — and NRCan’s Canadian zones are calculated from seven variables, so they are not interchangeable with USDA zones. A climate normal is a thirty-year average: an actual frost can arrive earlier or later than the average in any given year, and an average is not a forecast.

Some of our guidance is ours, and is not published climate data. We would rather label it than let it borrow the authority of the datasets beside it. The rule that a plant in a container behaves roughly two hardiness zones colder than the same spot in the ground is our stated rule of thumb. So is the fourteen-day allowance we add to seed-packet days-to-maturity for late-summer sowings, to account for shortening days. The cultivar hardiness ratings we publish are breeder-, nursery- and arboretum-rated rather than measured, and vary between sources; we flag the borderline ones. Treat all three as our best judgement, useful but not measured, and not a substitute for local experience.

5. Weather Strip

Every page carries a weather strip. It requests a forecast from Open-Meteo on every page load, for every visitor, without waiting for you to interact with it. If you type a city into the strip, that city name goes to Open-Meteo’s geocoding service. If you press the locate button and grant your browser’s location permission, your device’s coordinates are sent to Open-Meteo and to OpenStreetMap’s Nominatim service to be turned into a place name — Nominatim is contacted only in that case. Our privacy policy describes what each of those requests reveals.

Weather data is provided as-is by those services. We make no warranty as to its accuracy, completeness or timeliness, and we do not control it. Do not make decisions that matter — covering a crop, harvesting ahead of a freeze — on the strength of this strip alone.

6. Plant Toxicity, Pets and Children

Our plant-toxicity information is general reference, not veterinary or medical advice. This applies to every page on this site that states whether a plant is toxic or non-toxic — around 140 of them across English and French: the pet-safe roundups, the houseplant index badges, the individual care guides, which each carry a one-line verdict, and the growing guides that mention toxicity in passing. About half of those pages name the ASPCA database on the page and about half do not; this clause applies to all of them either way. The toxicity verdicts and badges follow the ASPCA toxic and non-toxic plant database, which is a general reference compiled for a wide audience; it is not specific to your animal, its size, its health or the amount eaten. Plant naming is also genuinely ambiguous — several unrelated plants share a common name — so a verdict attached to one name may not describe the plant in your house.

If a pet or a child has already eaten part of a plant, do not use this site to decide what to do. Contact a veterinarian, an emergency animal hospital, your local poison control centre, or the Pet Poison Helpline (1‑855‑764‑7661, a fee-for-service line) immediately. Take the plant or a photograph of it with you if you can. Do not induce vomiting unless a veterinary or medical professional tells you to — for some plants it makes the outcome worse. Some exposures are emergencies even in small amounts. Before introducing any plant into a home with pets or young children, verify it with your veterinarian or a poison control centre rather than relying on us.

7. Advertising and Affiliate Links

Advertising. Most pages on this site carry third-party advertising, currently served by Raptive. We do not choose, review or endorse the individual ads you are shown, we do not control them, and an ad appearing on a page is not a recommendation by us. Our privacy policy explains the cookies and data involved, and your choices about personalised advertising. Our three legal pages — this one, the privacy policy and the affiliate disclosure — carry no advertising at all. The three language home pages (English, French and Spanish) and our calculators carry a lighter ad layout.

Affiliate links. Some pages contain affiliate links. If you click one and make a purchase, we may receive a commission at no additional cost to you. We link only to products we believe are relevant and useful, and affiliate relationships do not decide what our guides say — there are pages where we deliberately carry no product link because the honest advice on that page is that you do not need one. Prices, availability and the products themselves are the retailer’s, not ours, and change without notice. Our current affiliate programs are Amazon.ca Associates and West Coast Seeds; our affiliate disclosure page describes each of them and is the list we keep current. Every product link on this site is an affiliate link. They all go to Amazon.ca or West Coast Seeds, and each one is marked as such at the link itself. Links to the sources we cite — Environment and Climate Change Canada, Natural Resources Canada, municipal bylaw pages — earn us nothing.

8. Content You Submit

Four things on this site accept something from you: the star rating under a guide, the feedback form, the “ask us to cover a topic” form, and the search box. The first three are covered below; the search box is different enough to take first.

The site has a search box, and we keep a log of what is typed into it. The log records the search text, the time, and how many results it returned — not who searched. We read it for one reason: to find out what visitors look for and fail to find, and then write it. Several pages on this site exist because of it. The same search text also goes to our analytics, and our privacy policy sets out both. So treat the search box as a message to us as well as a query — it is a poor place to type anything private, and nothing about yourself needs to go into it.

Ratings are published. When you rate a page, your rating is combined with everyone else’s and the average is displayed publicly on that page. Once a page has at least three ratings, that average and the number of ratings are also published in the page’s structured data, where search engines can read and display them. By rating a page you grant us a non-exclusive, royalty-free, worldwide, perpetual licence to use your rating in that aggregate and to publish it in that way. Our server records nothing about who voted — only a running total, a count and the average. We do set one cookie on your own device, gg_rated_ followed by a hash of the page address, which lasts a year and records only that this browser has already rated that page; it holds no score, and it is never read back into the rating store. So an individual rating cannot be identified, withdrawn or traced back to you — which also means we cannot remove yours on request.

Feedback and topic requests. Anything you send us through those forms is not confidential and we are under no obligation to keep it so. You grant us a non-exclusive, royalty-free, worldwide licence to read it, act on it, and use it to decide what to write — including writing about a topic you asked for — without payment, credit or any obligation to you. We do not publish your submission, your name or your email address, and we do not intend to; if that ever changed we would ask first. You keep whatever rights you had in what you wrote.

What you must not submit. Do not submit anything unlawful, defamatory, hateful, threatening or obscene; anything that infringes someone else’s copyright, trademark or privacy; anyone else’s personal information; malware or code; or advertising, promotional or link-building material. Submit only what is yours to submit, and only what you are content for us to keep.

We may moderate, and we do. We may read, filter, refuse, delete or decline to act on any submission, at our discretion and without notice or explanation. We may also block or refuse access to anyone abusing these forms. What actually protects each of the three is different, and it is worth being exact about which:

• The feedback form is the one with real defences: a limit of a few messages an hour from one connection, a hidden field that automated senders fill in and people do not, automatic spam filtering, and a log of what the filter rejected. A rejected message is not delivered to us and you are not told — deliberately, because telling a spam sender it was rejected simply produces a second attempt. The log exists so a genuine message caught by mistake can be found: if you wrote to us and heard nothing back, write again and say so, and we will look for it.
• The topic-request form has the hourly limit and a check that stops the same browser sending the same request twice. It has no spam filter and no rejection log.
• The star rating has none of that — no hourly limit, no hidden field, no filter, no log. It is protected only against being submitted from another site, plus the cookie described above, which records that this browser has rated that page — and you can clear that cookie. We do not claim it is one vote per person.

None of this is a promise to monitor everything, and we accept no responsibility for a submission we have not seen or acted on.

Removal. To ask us to delete a message or a topic request you sent, use the contact route in section 19 and tell us the email address you used. Our privacy policy sets out what deletion does and does not reach — nightly backups hold copies for about thirty days, and we would rather say so than imply an erasure we cannot deliver.

9. Newsletter Emails

If you enter your email address in a signup form on this site, you are consenting to receive gardening emails from us, and you confirm the address is yours to subscribe. Every email carries an unsubscribe link, and unsubscribing is free, needs no explanation and takes effect immediately. The consent wording, our mailing address and the email provider we use are set out in the newsletter section of our privacy policy. We may change what we send, how often we send it, or stop sending altogether. The gardening information in an email is subject to the same disclaimers as the site — sections 3 through 6.

Frost alerts are a convenience, not a guarantee, and you should not garden as though one is coming. Where we offer an email alert when frost is forecast for your city, it depends on a forecast we do not produce, a third-party service delivering the email, and our own scheduled job running on time — and any of those can be late, wrong, or silent. We may delay an alert, send it after the frost, or fail to send one at all, and we accept no responsibility for a crop lost to an alert that did not arrive. Arrival is not ours to control either: a spam filter, your mail provider or your own network can delay or discard an alert we sent on time, so an email that left our system may still never reach your inbox. The forecast itself carries the same caveats as the weather strip in section 5: an overnight low is a prediction, frost can form on a clear calm night at air temperatures above the reading, and a local forecast the evening before beats any email from us. Treat an alert that arrives as a useful nudge, and its absence as no information at all.

10. The Garden Hunt

From time to time we run a seasonal garden hunt: a set of pages each carrying a letter, which together spell a word. It is a free activity for its own sake. There is no prize, no draw, no entry fee and no purchase, and completing it wins nothing but the word. It is not a contest or lottery.

Your progress is stored in your own browser, not on our server, so clearing your browser data ends the hunt and we cannot restore it. We may change the stops, the letters, the dates or the rules at any time, may run or not run a hunt in any season, and may end one early. Outside a hunt window the pages are ordinary pages. The answer may become publicly known, and we make no effort to prevent that.

11. Intellectual Property

What is ours. The written guides, the site design, our calculator and tool code, our own graphics and diagrams, and our compilation and interpretation of the climate data — the choice of cities and stations, the arrangement of the tables, and the plain-language readings we put beside them — are owned by GrowersGuide.ca. Section 1 sets out what you may do with each.

What is not ours, and we should not imply otherwise. The frost and degree-day climate normals are published by Environment and Climate Change Canada, and the plant hardiness zones by Natural Resources Canada; those underlying figures are theirs and are subject to their own terms, which govern your use of them. The cultivar hardiness ratings originate with breeders, nurseries and arboreta. The typefaces are served by Google Fonts under their own licence. The pins on our home page are served from Pinterest’s own image servers and belong to the people who posted them, not to us. Product names, brands and logos belong to their owners. Where a page names another source, that source’s rights are unaffected by anything here.

Also not ours, and served or reproduced on the pages that use it. The weather strip’s forecasts are Open-Meteo’s data, and when you use the locate button the place name comes from OpenStreetMap’s Nominatim service — both belong to those projects and carry their own licence terms. Our plant-toxicity verdicts follow the ASPCA’s toxic and non-toxic plant database. The bylaw guides quote municipal law directly — Toronto’s Municipal Code Chapter 489, Ottawa’s Property Standards By-law 2013-416, Saskatoon’s Bylaw 8175 and Calgary’s Community Standards Bylaw — which is those municipalities’ text, not ours, and each page links the original. A botanical point or two rests on Kew’s Plants of the World Online, credited where it is used. And the advertisements are the advertisers’ own creatives, served by Google: we neither make them nor own them.

Copyright complaints. If you believe something on this site infringes your copyright, tell us and we will look at it promptly. Write to hi@growersguide.ca or use our contact form, and include: the URL of the page, enough description to identify the material, the work you say it infringes, your contact details, and a statement that you are the rights holder or authorised to act for them. Our postal address is GrowersGuide.ca, Markham, Ontario, Canada. We would rather hear from you than from a lawyer, and if we have got something wrong we will remove or correct it.

12. Disclaimer of Warranties

The site and everything on it are provided “as is” and “as available”, without warranties of any kind, whether express or implied, including any implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy or non-infringement, to the maximum extent Canadian law permits.

In particular: we do not promise that the site will be available, uninterrupted, timely, secure or error-free, that a calculator will always return a result, that a defect will be corrected, or that the site is free of anything harmful. Content can be out of date, incomplete or simply wrong, and third-party services we rely on can fail without warning. We may change, suspend, withdraw or discontinue the site, or any page, dataset, download, embeddable widget or tool on it, at any time and without notice. Nothing here is professional advice of any kind — horticultural, veterinary, medical, legal or financial.

Some jurisdictions do not allow certain warranties to be excluded, so parts of this section may not apply to you. Nothing here limits any right you have that cannot lawfully be waived.

13. Limitation of Liability

To the maximum extent permitted by Canadian law, GrowersGuide.ca and its operators shall not be liable for any direct, indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages arising from your use of the site, its content, its datasets or its tools — including but not limited to crop loss, plant loss, property damage, harm to an animal, wasted expenditure, lost time, lost profits, or damage resulting from reliance on our planting guides, toxicity information or calculators — whether or not we were advised of the possibility.

Nothing in these Terms excludes or limits liability that cannot lawfully be excluded or limited, and nothing here affects any non-waivable right you have under the consumer-protection law of your own province.

14. Indemnification

You agree to defend, indemnify and hold harmless GrowersGuide.ca and its operators from and against any claim, demand, loss, liability, damage, cost or expense (including reasonable legal fees) arising out of or related to your breach of these Terms — including your reuse or republication of content outside what section 1 permits, anything you submit under section 8, and any unlawful or infringing use of the site. We may take over the defence of any such claim at our own expense, and you agree not to settle a claim affecting us without our written consent.

15. External Links

GrowersGuide.ca links to external websites — government climate sources, municipal bylaws, retailers, other gardening sites. We are not responsible for their content, accuracy, availability or privacy practices, a link is not an endorsement, and once you follow one you are on someone else’s terms. Links go stale: a page we cited can move, change or disappear, and we check them periodically rather than continuously.

16. Governing Law

These terms are governed by the laws of the Province of Ontario and the federal laws of Canada applicable therein. Any disputes shall be resolved in the courts of Ontario, subject to any non-waivable right you have to bring proceedings in your own province.

17. General

Severability. If any provision of these Terms is found unenforceable, it is to be limited or severed to the minimum extent necessary and the rest remains in force.

Entire agreement. These Terms, together with our privacy policy and affiliate disclosure, are the entire agreement between you and us about your use of the site, and replace anything said earlier on the subject.

No waiver. If we do not enforce a provision, that is not a waiver of it and we may enforce it later.

Assignment. You may not assign or transfer your rights under these Terms. We may assign ours, for example if the site changes hands, and these Terms continue to apply.

No third-party beneficiaries. These Terms are between you and us. They create no rights for anyone else.

Language. These Terms are published in English and in French. The French version is provided for the convenience of French-speaking readers; where the two differ on a point of substance, tell us and we will correct whichever is wrong.

18. Changes to These Terms

We may update these terms at any time. The date at the top of this page reflects the most recent revision. Continued use of the site after a change constitutes acceptance of the updated terms. We do not keep an archive of earlier versions, and there is no notification — if the terms matter to you, check the date.

19. Contact

Questions about these terms, a permission request, a copyright complaint or a deletion request: our contact form or email hi@growersguide.ca.

GrowersGuide.ca, Markham, Ontario, Canada