An almanac for Australian beds
What to plant. How many you need. By this weekend.
Free forever for two beds, no card. The only garden planner that does the maths for you: postcode in, plan out, we’ll size the beds, pick the crops, and nudge you the morning before it’s time to sow.
No card, free forever for 2 beds. Every new garden gets 14 days of the full Grower toolkit, then it settles back to free.
87 Australian crops · 5 climate zones · every postcode from Darwin to Hobart.
Step one
Where’s your garden?
Or try a capital
What Grower unlocks
Email reminders the morning before each sow date.
Photo journal that learns what works in your patch.
Succession planner so your harvest never gaps.
14-day trial · no card to begin · cancel in 2 clicks.
No. I · what arrives the week you sign up
The Almanac
No. 01 · The drawing
Not a rough grid or a generic preview. A proper top-down plan with every plant to the centimetre, marigolds on the edges, trellis along the north wall, the way a real gardener sketches on a napkin.
Bed 1, Spring kitchen garden
1.2 m × 2.4 m · Temperate · Full sun
Spring · Wk 38
No. 02 · Your patch
Five Australian climate zones. Every planting date, frost window, and watering schedule shifts with yours, from postcode 0800 (Darwin) to 7000 (Hobart).
No. 03 · Good neighbours
Basil flanks the tomatoes. Marigolds edge the brassicas. Nasturtiums keep the aphids off. We place them for you, and won’t pair onions with peas no matter how pretty it looks.
The full matrixNo. 04
Four in the family? You need seven tomato plants and two-point-eight square metres. We run the ABS consumption figures against your beds and tell you before you plant too little.
No. 05 · The nudge
“Time to sow your second batch of lettuce.” Simple emails when they matter. Nothing else.
No app to open. No streak to keep. Just the right reminder, the morning it counts.
No. 06 · Off to the nursery
Every seed, seedling, and stake you’ll need, with fifteen local nurseries sorted by distance, phone numbers at the ready.
No. 07 · The catalogue
From bok choy to brussels sprouts, basil to borage. All with correct spacing, planting months, and companion data for your climate zone.
Browse the growing guidesWhere to begin
The free plan draws your beds, lists your crops, and lays out the year. The paid tiers run the season for you when your garden grows past it. No card to begin, and nothing to lose by trying.
Plenty for a kitchen garden you plan once and check on through the season.
Start free with 2 bedsNew accounts also get 14 days of Grower on the house, then settle back to free.
two beds, drawn to scale, planted to your postcode.
Free for your first 14 days, then $48/yr.
No card to begin, cancel in 2 clicks, settles back to free.
The method
Sign up on the couch. Have your first plan before the kettle boils.
iPostcode, one or two bed dimensions, how many mouths you’re feeding. Two minutes with a tape measure.
(We detect your climate zone from the postcode, no zone charts.)
iiPick a starter kit, Salad Garden, Winter Staples, Stir-Fry, or say ‘surprise me’. Veto anything you can’t stand.
(Herbs and companion flowers are handled for you.)
Kept & vetoed
the planner works around what you won’t eat.
iiiEvery bed filled to scale with vegetables, companions, and a 12-month schedule. Accept it, or keep tweaking.
(Your shopping list is already waiting on the next screen.)
ivSnap a photo every week. The journal logs what thrived, what didn’t, and which varieties to plant again next season.
(Photo journal & succession planner are Grower features, unlocked during your 14-day trial.)
From the field
Gardens from Plant Planner users across Australia. Different postcodes, different zones, the same working tool.
Want yours here? Enable your public profile in Settings once you’ve drawn a bed.
From the founder
Last summer the patch did roughly 25-30 kg of tomatoes, around 12 kg of zucchini, and about 14 weeks of continuous lettuce off five raised beds, feeding a family of four. The succession scheduler kept us from missing the second sowing window. The reminders did the rest. Best guess: ~$180 in supermarket veg we didn’t have to buy.
Tomatoes
~28 kg
Lettuce
14 wks
Saved
~$180
Daniel Hall · Founder
Central Coast, NSW
In their words
I love that it calculates how much soil, and how much to grow for my family.
Being able to seamlessly see my garden at a glance, and know which plants are companion-friendly.
across Australia
Bok Choy
in 3 climate zones
×21
Calendula
in 2 climate zones
×11
Viola
in 2 climate zones
×11
Chives
in 2 climate zones
×10
Silverbeet
in 2 climate zones
×8
Carrot
in 3 climate zones
×7
Live from the patch
138
gardens being planned
Australian patches with at least one bed drawn
174
crops planted in July
added to a bed since the first of the month
253
raised beds drawn this winter
each one with real dimensions, sun and soil
Built in Australia, for Australian gardens. Numbers refreshed hourly from the live patch.
A note on timing
Spring sowing opens in roughly 7 weeks. Lifetime is capped at 50 founding spots, 2 left.
The Subscription
Start free forever, or take Grower for a 14-day spin. Upgrade when you outgrow two beds, or stay small. No lock-in, no surprise invoices.
All prices in
AUD
Lock in founding pricing while it’s open · 14-day Grower trial · cancel in two clicks · 30-day money-back on annual plans.
Not sure which?
Showing annual prices.
Get started for free. No card, no trial clock, no expiry.
Upgrade only when you outgrow it
Recommended for families of 2-4
For the serious home gardener
Save $12 / year
What this saves you
Pays for itself in 6 weeks, roughly $180/year in dead seedlings, missed planting windows, and last-minute supermarket veg.
Two cooks, one garden
Save $24 / year
What this saves you
Plus the second-cook household saves another $300+/yr in midweek shop runs once the patch is feeding two kitchens.
For the serious self-sufficient grower
Save $36 / year
What this saves you
Plus $600+/yr in pantry staples once succession planting and preservation kick in.
Homestead checkout opens shortly
2 of 50 founding spots left
A single payment, locked at $99. Homestead features for as long as Plant Planner exists. Every future feature, no renewals, no price hikes, even when we raise the monthly rate.
What this saves you
Pays itself back in year three. Locked in before any price hike.
Billed once · never again
The lay of the land
Plant Planner
Built for an Australian patch.
Australian climate zones, ABS family-size math, postcode-tuned calendar, companion logic built in. Reminders the morning before the kettle boils.
GrowVeg · ~$35/yr
Northern-hemisphere defaults.
Drag-and-drop planner with no Australian climate zones, January in Hobart is treated like January in Yorkshire.
Gardenate · Free
Monthly tips, no plan.
Useful what-to-plant-this-month notes, but no bed planning, no family-size maths, no reminders when the seed packet says “sow now”.
Built and supported in Australia. No US-style “cancel anytime but actually we won’t let you”.
No credit card for the free plan. Cancel anything monthly in two clicks. Lifetime is fully refundable within 14 days.
Why Plant Planner
Australian-first, climate-zone-aware, sized to your household. Most planning apps were written for the US or UK; this one starts with your postcode and your family, and works out the rest from there.
I. The climate
Your postcode tells us your climate zone, your frost window, and the months that matter. Australia spans five working zones, Tropical (Darwin), Subtropical (Brisbane), Temperate (Sydney, Perth, Adelaide), Cool (Melbourne, Hobart, Canberra), and Arid (Alice Springs, parts of WA and SA), and every recommendation, sowing date, and reminder is tuned to which one you’re in.
City-specific almanacs are written for Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide, Hobart, Darwin, and Canberra. Each one is a month-by-month sow-plant-harvest list, not a generic chart.
A working starter list for July. The full sow / plant / harvest calendar lives on each city page.
II. The maths
The planner uses Australian Bureau of Statistics household consumption figures, multiplied by the number of people you actually feed, to work out how many plants of each crop would cover a year. No more “a few tomatoes, I suppose”, there’s a number, and the bed is sized to it.
For a family of four, the working maths looks like this:
The planner does this for every crop you choose. The deeper walk-through is in the journal piece how many tomato plants for a family of four.
The only garden planner that does the maths for you.
III. The patch
Every bed is drawn with a working companion-planting mix, pest-repelling herbs (rosemary, sage, basil), pollinator-pulling flowers (marigold, nasturtium), and crops that grow well shoulder-to-shoulder. The chart from the back of a seed catalogue is in there, and you don’t have to memorise it.
The maths is checked against the plant-spacing guide for every crop, so the bed doesn’t end up overstuffed in the second month. And the schedule plans succession sowings, a second round of lettuce three weeks after the first, a follow-on carrot bed when the brassicas come out, so the patch keeps producing, not all at once. The list of what to plant now is the public face of that rolling schedule.
It works whether you grow in raised beds or pots, and you don’t need either to begin. Build a grow list of what you actually want to eat, and the sowing calendar lays out when to start seeds, plant out, and harvest each one for your zone, all from curated Australian planting data.
IV. The alternatives
The honest version: GrowVeg is a polished planner built around US and UK hardiness zones, so the dates need translating before they’re useful here. Gardenate is an Australian-friendly month-by-month list but stops short of drawing your beds, sizing the harvest to a family, or sending reminders. A hand-built spreadsheet does the maths once and then quietly rots in a drawer.
Plant Planner is opinionated about the local case, Australian climate zones, Australian frost dates, Australian consumption figures, and a drawn bed at the end of it. The longer side-by-side lives on the compare page.
Related almanac entries
The colophon
Didn’t see your question? Email support@plantplanner.com.au, a real person reads every reply.
The invitation
Pull out the tape measure, grab your postcode, and spend three minutes with us. We’ll draw the rest.
what the morning email looks like.
Free forever for two beds, postcode to plan in minutes. New accounts also get 14 days of every Grower feature, then settle back to free. Cancel any paid plan in 2 clicks.