About Sow Now

What to plant this week, where you live.

How it works

Sow Now is a visual chooser for vegetables and fruit. Tell it where you grow, answer a handful of taps, and it shows the plants that suit you and can go in this week.

“Can go in this week” works the way planting guides do, season first:

• Your town’s climate zone (tropical, subtropical, temperate, cool or cold) comes from its average temperature in the coldest month.
• Each plant has a planting calendar for each zone, from published zone calendars and nursery planting seasons. In the Northern Hemisphere the calendar shifts by six months.
• This month is in or out of that calendar. Frost-tender plants are also held back if your spot runs colder than its zone.
• Plants that can go in within the next three months show as “Coming up”, so you can plan ahead.

Your answers (what you want to grow, space, sun, seeds or seedlings, how long you will wait, how hands-on you are, classics or something different) then narrow and order that list. Every plant says why it made the list. Because the zone comes from your location’s own climate, it works anywhere in the world. Local conditions vary, so treat it as guidance.

Data and credits

• Climate: WorldClim 2.1 monthly average temperature. Fick, S.E. and R.J. Hijmans (2017), “WorldClim 2: new 1-km spatial resolution climate surfaces for global land areas”, International Journal of Climatology 37(12): 4302–4315. Licensed CC BY 4.0. We sampled it to a 0.5° grid (about 50 km) and ship it inside the app. worldclim.org
• Places: GeoNames (towns of 5,000 people and over), licensed CC BY 4.0. We trimmed it to the fields we use.
• Planting calendars: the months each plant goes in, per climate zone, compiled by us from public zone planting calendars, chiefly Gardenate, with Sustainable Gardening Australia and the RHS for checking, and nursery planting seasons for fruit trees. Planting months are facts; the wording and data structure are ours.
• Plant knowledge: varieties, spacing and how-to compiled by us from seed-company and extension guidance, including the Australian seed shops we link to, and checked against home-garden practice.

All of this is built in, so looking up your town does not send your details to anyone.

How we earn money

Sow Now is free, with no account and no ads. Some shop buttons are affiliate links: if you buy after clicking one, the shop may pay us a small commission at no extra cost to you. Links are marked as sponsored.

• Commission never changes what we recommend or the order of the list. Ranking uses only the season, your answers and how easy a plant is.
• We choose shops for their varieties and quality, not for the rate they pay. In Australia we start with Seeds of Plenty, Happy Valley Seeds, Diggers, The Seed Collection and QP Seedlings.
• We never show prices, because shops change them.

Your data

Your answers and patch stay in your browser. No account, no cookies. The privacy policy says what does and does not leave your device.

Publisher

Harfred Labs — support · harfredlabs@gmail.com