Planting calendar for Australia and New Zealand

How to use the calendar

Type your town, or pick a climate zone, then choose a month. The list shows every vegetable and herb in the calendar that can be sown or planted then, grouped by type. Each card tells you:

• How it starts: sown direct into the bed, raised as seedlings, or planted as cloves, seed potatoes, slips, crowns or runners.
• When it should be ready, counted from sowing or, for seedlings, from planting out, and a typical spacing. The plant spacing calculator turns a spacing into a plant count for your bed.
• Flags for the last month of a window, a window that has just opened and, when you pick a town, frost-tender crops that still face frost there.

Under the list, "coming up" names the crops whose window opens next month, so you can prepare beds and raise seedlings in time. The crop finder shows one crop's months in every zone side by side. Your zone and town are remembered on this device, and the page address changes as you go, so you can bookmark or share a view.

Climate zones, not states

Sowing times follow climate, and climate ignores state borders. Australian gardening guides mostly use five zones: tropical, subtropical, arid and semi-arid, temperate and cool. What changes between them is the thing that limits growing. In the south it is cold: frost-tender crops wait for spring, and hardy crops fill the autumn and winter. In the tropics it is the hot, wet summer, so the mild dry season is the main vegie season. The subtropics sit in between, and arid gardens dodge summer heat and, inland, winter frost.

Zone boundaries are fuzzy, and guides disagree about some towns. Melbourne is the best-known case: ABC Organic Gardener, Sustainable Gardening Australia and the Diggers Club call it cool, while other guides say temperate. The town list follows ABC Organic Gardener's city list where it names a town, and says so when other guides differ. Altitude matters as much as latitude: Toowoomba, the New England tablelands and the Canberra region are far colder than the coast below them.

New Zealand guides split the country three ways. Tui's planting guides use a warm north (Northland and Auckland), a middle band (the rest of the North Island and the top of the South Island) and a cool south (Canterbury, Otago and Southland), while the Kings Seeds sowing charts split it into a largely frost-free north and a frosty south. The calendar uses Tui's three regions, with Taupō and the central plateau moved into the cool south for their frosts.

Frost decides spring

For summer crops the real question is the last frost. Tomatoes, capsicum, eggplant, cucumbers, zucchini, pumpkins, melons, sweet corn, beans, okra, sweet potato, potatoes and basil are all frost-tender. The Bureau of Meteorology notes that a reading of 2.2 °C in the thermometer screen, about 1.2 m up, means the ground is approaching 0 °C, so a night at 2 °C or below counts as a potential frost.

When you pick a town, the calendar reads the long-term averages of the nearest Bureau station and flags frost-tender crops in any month that averages one or more such nights, or where the following month does. The numbers vary more than most people expect. Canberra averages 92 frosty nights a year, from April to November; Wagga Wagga 50, from May to October; Hobart 13; Melbourne's old city station 7; and Sydney's Observatory Hill none.

For New Zealand towns the calendar uses NIWA's ground-frost averages for 1991–2020 instead. NIWA counts a ground frost when the air just above short grass falls to −1 °C or lower. Christchurch averages 85 a year and Auckland Airport about 4.

Averages are not guarantees. In Canberra an ABC News analysis of Bureau records since 1940 found a potentially frosty night after Melbourne Cup Day in half of all years. Keep frost cloth handy for the first weeks after planting, especially in hollows and valleys, where cold air pools on still nights.

How the calendar is built

Each crop's months in each zone come from that zone's own sowing guides, compared month by month:

• National charts: the ABC Gardening Australia magazine planting guide, the ABC's earlier Vegie Guide, and the Diggers Club and Eden Seeds sowing tables, with Yates for the temperate and cool zones.
• Local authorities: the NT Government's sowing calendars for Darwin and Katherine and for Alice Springs, the WA agriculture department (DPIRD), Green Adelaide, the Canberra Organic Growers Society, Annette McFarlane's Queensland calendars, the Brisbane, Redland and Gold Coast organic growers' guides, Cairns Regional Council, Mildura Rural City Council, the Arid Lands Environment Centre in Alice Springs, Northey Street City Farm, Sustainable Gardening Australia, Peter Cundall's Tasmanian guide and Southern Harvest.
• New Zealand: Tui's region-by-region planting tool and 2025 poster, the Kings Seeds and NZ Gardener sowing charts for northern and southern areas, Egmont Seeds and Yates NZ. Where Tui and Kings disagree, only the months both list are shown.

A month is kept when most of a zone's sources list it; in the tropics the NT Government's dry-season months take precedence. The ABC magazine planner and Gardenate turned out to share much of their data, so they count as one source, and Gardenate is used only as a cross-check. Where sources split with no majority, the chart says "No agreed months" rather than guess. Months cover sowing seed, in trays or direct, and planting seedlings, cloves, tubers, crowns or runners.

Frost figures are Bureau of Meteorology long-term averages, or NIWA's in New Zealand, for the station named against each town. Harvest times are the typical ranges from Australian seed companies and growing guides. The calendar is a guide to the usual season, not a promise about this year's weather: check the forecast before planting out, and trust your own garden's record over any chart.

Questions