What “inside the window” means
This check compares the date on your device with a dated planting window from a cited extension guide. It answers a narrow question: does today fall inside a range that publication already printed, after week offsets are applied to the median frost dates when the guide itself used weeks? It does not answer whether the plant is safe, whether the soil is warm, or whether a freeze is coming this week.
Choose a crop in the planting calendar first. The checker does not run until a crop is selected. If the state has no cited guide, there is no window to test, and the page says so. If the crop’s text is a phrase without two dates, the checker leaves that phrase out. It will not guess that “early spring” means March 1 through March 20.
How to read the result
The result uses today’s date from the device clock, not a date stored on the server. If the clock is wrong, the answer is wrong. When today falls inside a window, the sentence names that window, the publisher, and the start and end dates used for this season. When today falls outside every dated window that was checked, the sentence says so, and it names the next window whose start date is still ahead, if one exists.
A spring window and a fall window can both exist for the same crop. The check looks at each of them, and at any regional month range the guide dated. Being inside one of them is not a reason to ignore the others. A fall crop can be inside its window while the spring window for the same name is closed.
The paragraph under the answer repeats two station facts on purpose. There is a 10% chance the last 32°F at that station occurs on or after the later spring date, and a 10% chance the first 32°F occurs on or before the earlier fall date. Those probabilities come from the 1991–2020 normals. They are not a forecast, and they do not shrink because a guide’s window is open. A window can be open on a day that is still inside the frost-risk tail.
Use the result as a reading of a published table against a calendar date. For the actual bed, the linked guide and your county extension office still know more about variety, soil, and this season than this page does. The disclaimer states that limit in one place.