seed planting & propagation
Australian seed planting summary guides
This section lists summaries of 5 seed planting guides for Australia.  Click the Links on the left to view them.  Currently only the cool zone planting guide is listed but I plan to eventually list  the temperate and tropical zones as well.

about these guides
Pick up any decent book on vegetable gardening in Australia and it will have a monthly vegetable planting guide.  However if you compare two or more of these guides you will notices differences in :-
  • What vegetables can be planted each month.
  • The types of vegetables that are listed, all the guides list key vegetables such as carrots or tomatoes but different planting guides list different types of the less common vegetables.
  • Variations in the different zones in terms of area covered.
To try and come up with a guide that covers the widest number of vegetables and offers you the most accurate monthly listings of when to plant I have taken five Australian vegetable planting guides, three historical guides going as far back to the 1950s and two contemporary ones, and collated them into a single vegetable planting guide summary.  For copyright reasons I will not name the guides.


using the guides
If you click on the Cool Climate Zone Seed Planting Summary Guide link on the left hand side you will open a PDF chart with a list of vegetables, the months of the year and two sets of coloured  and numbered squares.

On the left hand side of the guide is a single row of brownish coloured squares.  Each square sits next to the name of a vegetable.  These squares have a number from 1 to 5, the higher the number the darker the colouring of the square. 1 indicates that only one of the vegetable guides listed the vegetable that the square sits next to.  5 indicates that all five vegetable planting guides listed the vegetable.

1 2 3 4 5




In the month columns are squares that are either blank or have a number from 1 to 5.  These numbered squares are coloured various shades of green, the higher the number the darker the shade of green.  A blank square indicates that none of the guides recommend that the corresponding vegetable be planted in that month.  A dark green square with the number 5 in it indicates that all five seed planting guides indicate that the corresponding vegetable  can be planted in that month.

  1 2 3 4 5




If all five guides indicate that a vegetable can be planted in a given month then you can be pretty sure that it is ok to do so, the lower the number the higher the liklihood that  a vegetable is on the edge of it's planting season.



map of the Australian seed planting guide cool climate zone
The Australian seed planting guide
cool climate zone
Cool climate zone area
The area defined as the cool climate zone varies slightly from seed guide to guide but in generalised terms it covers all of Tasmania, most of Southern Victoria to just over the great dividing range and the highlands of Southern and Central New South Wales.