WindRiverGreens/plant-variety-database

Plant Variety Database

An open dataset that joins cultivar-level seed-catalog data with USDA hardiness zones and per-zone monthly planting calendars — 1,972 varieties × 13 zones × 12 months, fully sourced, CC BY 4.0.

The hero rows aren't the 1,972 varieties (USDA PLANTS already has ~98K species). They're the joins:

• 20,728 variety × zone planting-calendar entries (indoor sow / transplant / direct sow / harvest windows)
• 21,880 companion-plant pairings with relationship and reason
• 2,327 outbound citations to extension factsheets, breeder pages, and USDA records (92% of varieties carry at least one)
• 1,036 USDA FoodData Central nutrition records joined to growable varieties

The full interactive version — variety pages, planting calendars per zone, companion-plant prose, troubleshooting guides, and per-county zone maps for all 50 US states + 13 Canadian provinces — lives at plants.windrivergreens.com.

Why this dataset exists

USDA PLANTS gives you species-level taxonomy but no cultivars and no planting calendars. Johnny's Selected Seeds catalog gives you cultivar-level days-to-maturity but no zone-by-zone schedule and no nutrition. NC State Extension gives you growing prose but no structured cultivar database. Hardiness zone shapefiles give you a map but no variety information.

This dataset is the join. 1,972 hand-cleaned variety rows, each linked to a planting calendar for every USDA zone it grows in, with companion plants, common pests and diseases, and (where applicable) USDA nutrition data per 100g — all in flat CSVs with verifiable source citations.

Files

File	Rows	What it is
varieties.csv	1,972	One row per cultivar — name, scientific name, days to harvest, plant size, sun/water/soil needs, USDA zones, pest/disease info
categories.csv	30	Plant category index (tomato, herb, rose, succulent, etc.)
zones.csv	13	USDA hardiness zones 1-13 with temperature ranges, frost dates, growing-season length
planting_calendar.csv	20,728	Variety × zone — when to start indoors, transplant, direct-sow, harvest
companion_plants.csv	21,880	Beneficial and harmful plant pairings with reasons
nutrition.csv	1,036	Per-100g nutrition (calories, macros, vitamins, minerals) from USDA FoodData Central
sources.csv	2,327	Outbound citations per variety

All files are UTF-8 CSV with a header row. Foreign keys: every variety_*.csv row joins back to varieties.csv via variety_id or variety_slug.

Quick start

from datasets import load_dataset

# Load any single config:
varieties = load_dataset("bripatch/plant-variety-database", "varieties", split="train")
calendar = load_dataset("bripatch/plant-variety-database", "planting_calendar", split="train")

# Tomatoes that mature in under 80 days and grow in zone 7:
import pandas as pd
df = varieties.to_pandas()
tomatoes_z7 = df[
    (df.category == "tomato")
    & (df.usda_zone_min <= 7)
    & (df.usda_zone_max >= 7)
    & (df.days_to_harvest.str.extract(r"(\d+)")[0].astype(float) < 80)
]

Use cases

• Climate-zone migration modeling — pair usda_zone_min/usda_zone_max with future-zone projections (e.g. USDA PHZM) to see which cultivars become viable / unviable in a given county over time.
• Agricultural ML training — clean, labeled cultivar data with consistent feature schema for taxonomy, growability, and nutrition classification tasks.
• Garden-app / smart-home / IoT data — drop-in zone-aware planting calendar without re-licensing per-source data per platform.
• Nutrition × growability joins — nutrition.csv + varieties.csv lets you ask "which high-vitamin-K leafy greens grow in zone 4?" in one query.
• Companion-planting network analysis — companion_plants.csv is a 21,880-edge graph with relationship labels.

Field reference (varieties.csv)

Column	Type	Notes
id	int	Primary key
category	str	Lowercase slug — joins to categories.slug
name	str	Display name including cultivar
slug	str	URL slug — joins to *.variety_slug
scientific_name	str	Genus + species (+ cultivar epithet)
days_to_harvest	str	Range or value — e.g. 60-80, 70, or null. Parse with regex when filtering numerically.
days_to_germination	str	Same shape as days_to_harvest
plant_height, plant_spacing	str	Free-form imperial — e.g. 4-6 ft, 18-24 in
sun_requirement	str	full_sun, partial_sun, partial_shade, full_shade
water_requirement	str	low, medium, high
soil_ph	str	Range — e.g. 6.0-7.0
growing_difficulty	str	beginner, intermediate, advanced
growing_season	str	cool, warm, year_round
usda_zone_min, usda_zone_max	int	Hardy zone range, 1-13
is_heirloom, is_hybrid, is_container_friendly	bool
disease_resistance, common_pests, common_diseases	str	Semicolon-separated lists
source_database	str	Comma-separated — nc_state, johnnys, usda_plants
url	str	Permalink to the live variety page

Sources & verification

Every variety in this dataset is backed by at least one real data source — no AI-generated plant facts:

Source	Varieties	Contributes
NC State Extension	1,794 (91%)	Zones, height, light, growth rate, growing guides
Johnny's Selected Seeds	939 (48%)	Cultivar-level days to maturity, spacing, disease resistance
USDA PLANTS Database	506 (26%)	Species-level characteristics
USDA FoodData Central	1,036	Nutrition per 100g

92% of varieties (1,822 of 1,972) carry at least one verifiable outbound citation in sources.csv.

Updates

Auto-refreshed monthly from the live production database via GitHub Actions (1st of each month, 08:00 UTC). The canonical source is the GitHub repo: github.com/bripatch/plant-variety-database. This Hugging Face mirror is re-synced on the same cadence.

For reproducible research, pin to a specific tagged release on GitHub — those are immutable. The main revision on Hugging Face tracks the latest export and will change over time.

License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Free to share, adapt, and build on for any purpose — including commercial — as long as you credit Wind River Greens with a link back to plants.windrivergreens.com.

Citation

@misc{windrivergreens_plantdb_2026,
  author       = {{Wind River Greens}},
  title        = {Plant Variety Database: A cultivar-level dataset with USDA hardiness zones and per-zone planting calendars},
  year         = {2026},
  version      = {1.0.0},
  url          = {https://github.com/bripatch/plant-variety-database},
  howpublished = {GitHub repository, Hugging Face mirror},
  note         = {CC BY 4.0. Live tool: \url{https://plants.windrivergreens.com}}
}

Issues, corrections, contributions

Spot a wrong zone, a misclassified variety, or a missing companion-planting relationship? Open an issue on the GitHub repo — corrections flow back into the live site and propagate here on the next monthly refresh.