Paul Gunder

Paul Gunder founded Rocky Mountain Apps, a small software company, and also runs Calcimator, a set of online calculators that includes garden calculators. Frost and Seed is a companion to that work. It handles the questions that are really about timing and reference figures, not arithmetic.

Why this site exists

Gardeners ask the same questions every season: when is the last frost, how late can a fall crop still go in, how many weeks do seedlings stay indoors, how far apart do these plants go. The answers exist, but they are scattered across university publications. Paul built this site to give those answers in one place with the source sitting beside each figure, so you can check it.

How sources are chosen

Frost dates come from NOAA's climate normals. Everything else comes from land-grant university Extension publications written for home gardeners. For each one Paul saves a copy of the page, quotes the lines the site relies on, and registers the source so that no figure appears without it. Each page shows when its figures were last checked and when they are due to be checked again, and the sources are rechecked on a schedule. The details are on the methodology page.

Who the experts are

The horticultural expertise on this site belongs to the Extension services it cites, not to Paul. He chooses the questions, finds and reads the publications, and keeps the pages faithful to them. If a page's advice matters for something you cannot afford to lose, read the original and ask your own state Extension office.

Reporting an error

If a figure is wrong, a source link is dead or a page says more than its source does, write to us through the contact page, name the page, and say what you think is right. Corrections go on the changes page.