What a hardiness zone means
USDA zones describe the average annual extreme minimum winter temperature. They help compare perennial cold tolerance, but they do not describe summer heat, rainfall, frost dates, soil or day length.
How this result is produced
The tool resolves the ZIP centroid, then checks that point against a public 2023 USDA hardiness-zone layer hosted through ArcGIS. Because a ZIP can include elevation and microclimate changes, confirm borderline results on the official USDA interactive map.