About Plan & Plant
Plan & Plant tells you when to sow and plant each crop where you live, worked out from local weather rather than a national rule of thumb.
What it does
- Your place. For 40 towns and cities in Canada, United Kingdom, and United States, we show the typical last spring frost, the first autumn frost, a safer planting date, and how long the growing season is.
- Your crop. For 19 common vegetables and herbs, we turn those dates into windows: when to start seeds indoors, when to plant out, when to sow outdoors, and roughly when you'll harvest. Options for fleece, a cold frame or an unheated greenhouse show how far cover moves the dates.
- Grow guides. For 31 plants, we explain the temperatures, timing and care they need. Method notes and data credits are on Methodology; per-guide citations are still being added.
It is not a shop, and it can't promise a harvest. Weather in any one year can be earlier or later than the typical dates; we say how often.
Who makes it
Plan & Plant is built and run by Aleksandr Gulbickij, an engineer and developer who gardens in Lithuania (USDA zone 6b).
Not every problem should be solved with engineering. Some definitely can.
I built Plan & Plant because the answers I needed as a gardener were scattered. Plant information lives across dozens of sites, half of them in Fahrenheit and half in Celsius. Last and first frost dates are easy to look up in the US, but not for most other places, including where I garden. And the questions that matter most are the hardest to answer: when to start seeds indoors, when to transplant, when to sow outside, and which plants actually suit my climate.
So I put it in one place, worked out from local weather, in the units you use.
The engineering part is the arithmetic: weather for your place, the same rules applied everywhere, and the working shown on the methodology page. The gardening part stays with you. Your soil, your slope and this year's weather still decide, and the dates here are a starting point for that judgement, not a replacement for it.
Plan & Plant is independent. It is not affiliated with any seed company, retailer or weather service.
Where the numbers come from
- Weather: ERA5 and ERA5-Land reanalysis from the Copernicus Climate Change Service, read through our own copy of the open-source Open-Meteo server. Published dates today use the 2019–2026 archive window (not yet a full 1991–2020 climate normal). Reanalysis is a consistent, gridded reconstruction of past weather; it is not a weather station in your garden.
- Places: GeoNames.
- Plant requirements: extension services, seed-trade tables and research papers. Shared climate and method sources are on Methodology; per-guide citations are being added.
How we turn these into dates, and where the method is weak, is on the methodology page. Corrections and how we use automation are on the editorial policy.
What we cover
40 places in Canada, United Kingdom, and United States, 31 grow guides, and local planting dates for 19 crops so far. More places are added only when their data pass our checks.
How to use it
- Choose your location.
- Read the frost dates and what you can plant now.
- Open a crop to see its local planting windows.
Contact
Found a date that doesn't match your garden, or a mistake? Please tell us: contact or alex@planandplant.garden. See also privacy and terms.