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” follows one rule, applied to your town’s average temperature for each month:

• The month’s average temperature is inside the range the plant sows or plants in.
• There is enough warm season left to finish the crop, counting forward from this month.
• Fruit trees and perennials also need winters that are cold enough to set fruit but not so cold they are damaged.
• Frost-tender plants must not be set out just before the weather cools.

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 it uses your location’s own temperatures and not a country chart or zone map, it works anywhere. 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.
• Plant knowledge: compiled by us from seed-company and extension guidance, and checked against home-garden practice. See the sources note in our repository.

Both datasets are 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