Planting Reminders and Frost Dates Video Lecture | Learn the art of Garden Planning: Garden Planner - Hobbies

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The Garden Planner makes it simple to
remember when to sow and plant
each vegetable in your garden.
The planting dates are all calculated for your particular area.
On the Garden Planner tab you can click
this button to set your location
(the map will be different depending on
the country you live in)
and search for your garden.
You can drag the marker, or search again if you need to locate your garden more accurately.
Click the Find My Frost Dates button and
the system looks up your frost dates
from our database of thousands of weather
stations,
which you can then adjust if necessary, or you can set them manually
if our database doesn't yet have the weather station data for your area.
These dates are then used by the
software to calculate the recommended
planting times for all your vegetables.
In places that get so hot that some
crops can't be grown through the summer,
you will need to select the Split Season
option.
This divides the growing season into separate spring and fall planting times for plants that need it.
Once you've set your frost dates and your plan is complete,
you just click the Plant List button and it calculates how many of each plant you need,
how to space them, and recommended dates.
Note that if you live in the Southern
hemisphere,
then the growing year will start in July,
rather than January.
The blue bars show when you can start seeds indoors or undercover, for example in a greenhouse.
The green bars show when you should transfer these plants into the ground,
or sow seed directly into the soil.
You'll notice that some plants don't have
blue lines,
because they're usually sown outside rather than being started in pots.
The orange bars show the expected range of harvest dates.
If on your Plant List you only see a harvest bar, but no green planting bar,
it means that you probably don't have a long
enough growing season to grow that plant,
unless you extend it with something like
a greenhouse.
If you want to define your own dates, then you can do this by adding your own custom varieties
as shown on our Adding Plants & Varieties video.
Not only do you get a full planting chart for each garden plan,
but you will also
receive email reminders twice a month
listing what you need to sow and plant in
the next 2 weeks
from all your plans for the current year.
Like the Plant List, these are customized
to your area
so they contain a very useful summary to
keep your garden on track.