How your planting calendar is put together

Location search covers Australian suburbs, localities and 4-digit postcodes nationwide. We ship a compact lookup of unique locality, state, postcode and a single representative coordinate per locality — never a full address dataset.

That lookup is derived from the open australian_postcodes dataset, which is itself built from Australia Post postcode data geocoded using G-NAF and ABS information published on data.gov.au.

Coordinates are representative centroids for a locality, not the position of any particular property.

Typing a suburb name or postcode matches against the locality lookup in your browser. Where several suburbs share a postcode, each is listed separately with its state so you can pick the right one.

We do not geocode street addresses, and you never need to enter one to use GrowCal.

Every locality resolves to exactly one curated regional growing profile using explicit state, postcode-range and coordinate rules — not a live climate model. Each state and territory has a guaranteed fallback profile, so any Australian location you can select will always produce a calendar.

The rules are deliberately simple and deterministic: the same locality always resolves to the same profile.

You'll see five broad Australian climate labels — cool, temperate, subtropical, tropical and arid. They exist to help you recognise your conditions and to organise general plant guidance.

They never drive calendar generation on their own. The curated regional profile is what generates your dates.

Each plant carries a base schedule for sowing, planting out, feeding, pruning, pest checks and harvest, authored against a temperate reference and derived for the other broad zones using documented seasonal shift rules.

Regional profiles then inherit a schedule template, can apply a whole-profile month shift, and can carry per-plant curated overrides where regional practice genuinely differs.

Your selected plants and their resolved schedules are grouped into month-by-month reminders. Each reminder becomes an all-day event across the coming 12 months and is exported as a standard .ics file.

The download is a one-time file you import into Apple Calendar, Google Calendar or Outlook. It is not a live subscription, so it does not update itself when our data changes.

Regional profile descriptions are written and reviewed by a person against general Australian growing practice, but are not yet backed by named citations.

Plant schedules are a preview dataset: seeded, plausible, and still being validated. We mark data as verified only once real, citable sources are attached to it — and we have not done that yet. Nothing here has been reviewed by a professional horticulturist or agronomist.

A locality-level profile cannot know about your frost pocket, your shaded courtyard, your rooftop, your soil or the variety you bought. Treat GrowCal reminders as a prompt to look at your garden, not an instruction.

Seasons also vary year to year. If a season is running late where you are, shift the job rather than forcing the date.

Locality data is derived from the open australian_postcodes dataset, built on Australia Post postcodes geocoded with Geoscape G-NAF and ABS data published on data.gov.au.

Incorporates or developed using G-NAF © Geoscape Australia licensed by the Commonwealth of Australia under the Open Geo-coded National Address File (G-NAF) End User Licence Agreement.