We Made Five Sowing Guides and They're Free
Five free sowing guides, one for each Australian climate zone: 58 plants, month by month, with soil temps and harvest times. Tell us where to send them.
September's here, the soil's waking up, and the seed racks are out the front of every hardware shop. The question is always the same: is it too early for this? The honest answer depends less on the calendar and more on where you live.
Australia doesn't have one growing season. The right month to sow a tomato in Hobart is months away from the right month in Darwin, and a chart that doesn't say which climate it's written for is no help at all.
So we made five guides instead of one: temperate, subtropical, tropical, arid and alpine. Each one covers 58 plants, which months to sow them in your zone, whether to sow direct or raise seedlings first, the soil temperature to wait for, and roughly how long until you're picking. One A4 page per zone. Print it and stick it on the fridge.
Which zone are you?
- Temperate: Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth and most coastal NSW, VIC, SA and southern WA.
- Subtropical: Brisbane, the Gold and Sunshine Coasts, the northern NSW coast and southern QLD.
- Tropical: Darwin, Cairns, Townsville, Broome and the far north.
- Arid: Alice Springs, Broken Hill, Kalgoorlie, Mildura and inland SA, NSW and WA.
- Alpine: Tasmania, Canberra, the high country, the Blue Mountains and the Adelaide Hills.
We compiled the guides ourselves from the sowing references Australian growers rely on, then checked the windows plant by plant, zone by zone. Where a plant simply doesn't suit a zone, the guide says so instead of pretending. Brussels sprouts have no business in Darwin. They're a general guide: seasons shift with your microclimate, so watch your own patch.
Where to get them
You can pay good money for guides like these. Ours are free. Pop your email in and we'll send all five straight away: keep the one that matches your patch, share the rest around.
And when your patch comes up short, someone up the road grows what you don't. That's what the map is for: open it and have a look what's growing near you.
Santo Arabia is the founder of SideStall, the Australian app for roadside stalls and farm gates. The guides are free and so is the app, on the App Store and Google Play.