GardenIt tells you before you plant it, not in March
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When you add a plant that is meant to come back every year, it is checked against your planting zone and you are told plainly if it will not live through your winter outdoors — and what to do instead, usually a pot of a stated size moved into an unheated garage or shed. It never blocks the save. Plants that come through your winter fine get no message at all.
What it actually says
Two sentences: what happens, and what to do instead. Adding a fig in zone 5 gets you “Fig will not live through winter outdoors where you are. Grow it in a 10–20 gallon pot and move the pot into an unheated garage or shed for the winter, and it will.”
The pot size is not decoration. “Grow it in a pot” leaves a beginner asking how big a pot, and 51 of the 53 crops this applies to carry a sourced container size, so we use it. The two that do not — garlic and fennel — get the other real answer instead: a thick mulch over them before the ground freezes.
You will notice the message never mentions a zone number. “Zones 7–10” is a data label. It tells you nothing if you have never grown a perennial, and what you need is what happens and what to do about it.
Why it never blocks you
Growing a plant outside its range is a normal, deliberate thing gardeners do. A fig in a pot that winters in the garage is a well-known way to eat figs in Michigan. A lemon tree on a Chicago porch in July is somebody who knows exactly what they are taking on.
So there is no dialog and no disabled button. The app suggests; it never acts, and it never argues. What it will not do is stay quiet and let February be a surprise.
Why most plants say nothing
This is the part worth being clear about, because a silent app can look like a broken one.
The check only speaks for plants you expect back next year, and only when the answer is no. A tomato says nothing because it was never going to overwinter. A blueberry in zone 5 says nothing because it is perfectly happy there. Both silences are answers.
It is the same rule the frost alerts run on. Every warning you fire that turns out not to matter spends a little of the attention you will need for the one that does.
Changing your zone later
It is on your profile screen, under “How cold your winter gets”. It sits in its own card rather than beside your frost dates, deliberately — the two numbers answer different questions and it is worth not blurring them.
Your frost dates answer when can I plant this. Your planting zone answers will this still be alive next spring. A great many people are told the first thing and given the second number, which is how “plant after your zone says so” became a piece of advice that cannot be followed.
Finding your zone, if you have never needed it
Updated on 22 August 2026. The picker used to be thirteen bare numbers. It never printed the words hardiness zone anywhere near them, and the only help underneath read “if yours is written 7a or 7b, pick 7” — which is a useful sentence if you already know you have a zone and how it is written, and meaningless otherwise.
It now says what the numbers are, and which way they run: 1 is the coldest winter, 13 the mildest. If you do not know yours, it is on the back of most seed packets, or you can search your ZIP code for it. The 7a/7b note is still there, second, where it belongs — it is a detail for people who already have the answer.
Half-zones make no difference to anything we can tell you, so 7a and 7b both go in as 7. We would rather round than pretend to a precision the advice does not have.
Common questions
- Where does the warning appear?
- Two places. On the add screen, as soon as you pick the plant — before it goes in the ground, which is the only moment it can save you anything. And on the plant's own page afterwards, so anything already in your garden carries the same answer.
- Will it stop me planting something?
- No. There is no confirmation box and no grayed-out button. People grow figs in zone 5 in pots on purpose, and that is a completely legitimate thing to do — it is your garden and your call. Our job is that you are not surprised in February.
- Why did my tomato get no warning?
- Because a tomato is not supposed to survive winter. Annuals live one season by design, so warning you that yours will not see spring would be true and useless. The check only speaks about the 53 crops in our database that you plant once and expect back: fruit trees, berries, rhubarb, asparagus, garlic, and the woody herbs like rosemary, sage and thyme.
- Why did my blueberry get no warning when my fig did?
- Because the blueberry is fine where you are and the fig is not. Silence is the answer, not a gap. If we spoke up about every perennial you added, you would learn to skim past the message — and then miss the one that mattered.
- Where does the zone range come from?
- Each crop's own record, built from US extension-service sources. Blueberry's cites eleven of them. The low end of the range is the one the warning uses: it is the coldest zone where the plant survives winter outdoors in place and starts growing again in spring.
- Why do you ask for my zone instead of working it out?
- Because we cannot work it out. Your frost dates come from a weather surface we hold, but a hardiness zone is a different measurement — the average coldest night of your winter — and we have no dataset for it. Rather than guess, we ask once and keep the answer. If you do not know yours, the app links to our guide, which sends you to the USDA map for a one-click lookup.
- My zone is 7b. What do I pick?
- Pick 7. Our crop ranges are whole zones, so the half-zone letter cannot change any answer we are able to give — asking for it would be collecting a detail we then throw away.
- What if my winters are too warm for a plant rather than too cold?
- We say nothing, on purpose. The two ends of a zone range are not the same kind of claim. The low number is a wall — below it the plant dies. The high number is usually about whether a fruit tree gets enough winter chill to crop well, which is a judgment about performance rather than survival, and we would rather stay quiet than hand you half an answer.
- Does it work offline?
- Yes. The whole crop catalog is stored on your phone and your zone is saved with your garden, so the check is instant and needs no signal.
Shipped 2026-08-06. Last checked 2026-08-22. Something here wrong or out of date? Tell us — support docs going stale is a bug.