Your information, plainly.

Last updated: October 19, 2026

Messages you send us

When you fill in the Get Involved form, we receive your name, email, what you’re interested in, and your message. The form is handled by Netlify, the company that hosts this website, which stores the message and emails a copy to our team. We use it only to reply and to follow up about what you asked for.

Emails you send to hello@sowcntr.com are forwarded by Cloudflare to our team’s inboxes.

We keep messages only as long as we need them to stay in touch with you. Ask us anytime and we’ll delete yours.

Monthly reminders

If you sign up on the Grow Guide, we keep your email address and the place you chose (for example “Paget, Bermuda”) so we can send you one short planting email each month. Sign-ups are stored by Netlify. We’ll never use your email for anything else, and every email will include a way to stop them. Ask us anytime and we’ll remove you.

Frost alerts

If you tap “Alert me before frost” and allow notifications, your browser gives us an anonymous address at its notification service (run by Google, Apple, Mozilla or Microsoft, depending on your device). We keep that address, the place you chose and its rough position (about 10 km), its time zone, and whether you prefer °C or °F, so we can send one notification around 4 pm on days when frost is likely that night. We don’t get your name, email, phone number or internet address. Notifications pass through your device maker’s notification service. Tap “Turn off alerts”, or block notifications for this site, and we stop; we delete addresses that stop working.

The Grow Guide

• Your first visit: to suggest a starting place, our hosting provider looks up the rough area of your internet connection (usually your city or region) and we pick the nearest town. This happens when the page loads and isn’t saved.
• “Use my location”: only if you tap it, and only after your device asks your permission. Your position is rounded to about 10 km on your device before it’s sent, used once to find your nearest town, and not saved.
• What you type in the search box is sent to find matching places, and isn’t saved.
• Frost forecast: for a town or small area, our server asks Open-Meteo, a free weather service, for that spot’s forecast. Open-Meteo sees only the place’s position (rounded to about 10 km), never your internet address, and we don’t save the request.
• Your choice (the place you picked and its rough position, and the crops you tapped in “My Garden”) is remembered in your own browser so the guide opens there next time. It never leaves your device, and you can clear it by clearing this site’s data in your browser.
• Offline use: your browser keeps copies of our pages and your last forecast so the guide works in the garden with no signal. They stay on your device and are cleared with this site’s data.

The garden helper (AI)

If you use “Ask the garden helper” on the Grow Guide, we send your question, your photo if you add one, and what the guide is showing you (your place, climate, frost dates, and this month’s tips) to an AI model to write the answer. Photos are shrunk on your device before they’re sent. The request goes through Netlify’s AI Gateway to Anthropic, the company that makes the Claude AI model. We don’t store your question, photo, or answer, and Netlify’s AI Gateway doesn’t keep them either. Anthropic handles them under its commercial terms, under which this kind of data isn’t used to train its models by default. Please don’t include names, faces, or other personal details in your photos or questions.

The helper can make mistakes. Treat its answers as friendly suggestions, not expert advice.

Counting visits

We use Cloudflare Web Analytics to see how many people visit and which pages they use, so we know what’s helpful. It doesn’t use cookies, doesn’t build a profile of you, and doesn’t follow you to other websites. We only see totals, like page views and which countries visitors come from.

Cookies

This site doesn’t set cookies. That’s why there’s no cookie banner. The one exception: once our calendar is live, the Google Calendar shown on the Events page may use Google’s own cookies.

Companies that help run this site

• Netlify hosts the website (including its fonts), handles the contact and reminder forms, runs the Grow Guide’s place search, stores frost-alert sign-ups, and passes garden helper questions to the AI model.
• Open-Meteo provides the Grow Guide’s weather forecasts. Our server asks it for a place’s forecast; it never receives information about you.
• Anthropic provides the Claude AI model that writes the garden helper’s answers.
• Cloudflare manages our domain, forwards hello@sowcntr.com, and provides our cookie-free visit counts.
• Google Calendar shows our events on the Events page once our calendar is live. Only that page loads it, and Google can see your internet address when it does.

Frost alerts reach your device through its own notification service (Google, Apple, Mozilla or Microsoft), which carries the message but can’t read it.

Each of these companies handles information under its own privacy policy. We don’t give any of them permission to use your information for advertising.

Children

Families are welcome at SOW Center. We don’t knowingly collect information from children through this website. If you think a child has sent us their details, let us know and we’ll delete them.

Your choices

You can ask us what we have about you, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it. Just email hello@sowcntr.com. We’ll reply as soon as we can.

Changes

If we change how we handle information, we’ll update this page and the date at the top.