Most grow your-own content online is a mess of generic calendars, Northern Hemisphere frost dates, and Pinterest photos of gardens that will never survive a real Australian summer. It's no wonder people plant the wrong thign at the wrong time and then quietly give up by March.

This is our attempt at fixing that. A free, zone aware workflow we've been building for years, from backyard seedling to harvest basket to "was it actually worth the effort", in three clear steps. It works whether you're up in the wet tropics, on a Dayboro ridge, on a Victorian highland block, or out in the arid centre.

We call it Seed to Plate. The name goes back to the old TradeShack days, the idea was always to track a vegetable from the moment the seed hits the dirt to the moment it hits the plate, and to know honestly whether it saved you money vs the supermarket. Years later, with a planting database covering all seven Australian grow zones, a national supermarket price scraper, subtropical live weather data from our Dayboro station, and a private tracker, the system is finally built. I'll be upfront about what's universal and what's subtropical tuned as we go through each step.

Step 2 is optional, you can skip straight from Step 1 to Step 3 if you already know what you're doing. The toolkit is for the people who want to squeeze more out of their patch. Garden Buddy is where you actually live if you stick with it.

Let's walk through each step.

Step 1, Find Your Grow Zone and See What's Plantable Now

This is the entry point. Our Veggie Guide is split into seven Australian grow zones. You pick yours, and the page instantly shows you what can actually go in the ground this month for your climate, with the expected harvest timeframe and the current supermarket price for each vegetable pulled from our live scrapers.

That last bit is what makes it useful and not just another planting calendar. Knowing cherry tomatoes can be planted in May in the subtropics is fine. Knowing cherry tomatoes are currently $9.80/kg at Coles and that a single plant in your backyard could easily yield 4–6 kg over the season, that's waht turns a general idea into a decision.

The seven Australian grow zones

Click the zone that matches where you live. Each page is dynamic, it updates every month, because what's plantable in cool temperate Victoria in April is very different from what's plantable in the wet tropics in April.

Not sure which one you're in? Hit the Zone Selector and either click the map or let it suggest the closest zone based on your location. Takes about ten seconds.

Write down (or just remember) the three or four vegetables that stood out. Maybe it's silverbeet because it's $7.50 a bunch at Woolies right now. Maybe it's cherry tomatoes because you eat two punnets a week. Maybe it's garlic because you finally want to try growing it. Whatever appeals, that's your shortlist for Step 2 or Step 3.

Open the Veggie Guide →

Step 2, Run the Seed to Plate Garden Toolkit (Optional)

Once you have a shortlist, the Seed to Plate Garden Toolkit is where you sharpen the plan. It's eight calculators, each one solving a specific problem, arranged in the order you'd actually use them during a growing season.

The order matters more than the tools themselves. Running the pest calculator before the companion planting checker is a bit like painting a house before you've nailed the walls on. We got tired of watching people start with watering schedules and pH tests for crops they hadn't even decided to plant yet, so we built the workflow in sequence.

Here's teh order and why each step exists:

• Crop Planner ✓ every zone Lock in what you're actually growing this season before you worry about soil or water. Works for any Australian climate zone.
• Companion Planting Checker ✓ every zone Sort out who goes next to whom. The pairings are chemistry and biology, they work everywhere.
• Soil pH Calculator ✓ every zone Test and amend for the actual plants, not a generic target. Pure chemistry, no weather data needed.
• Pest & Disease Risk Calculator ● subtropical SEQ Thresholds are universal; the live risk reading is from our Dayboro station. Outside SEQ, use the thresholds as a checklist against your own weather.
• Smart Watering Calculator ● subtropical SEQ ET formulas are universal; the live numbers are Dayboro. Treat the output as directional if you're in cool temperate or arid country.
• Spray Window Calculator ● subtropical SEQ The meteorology rules (wind, temperature, inversions) apply everywhere. The live wind/temperature read is Dayboro, cross check against your own local conditions.
• Harvest Date Calculator ● subtropical SEQ Growing degree days maths is universal. The tool uses our Dayboro temperature history; if you're elsewhere, plug your own max/min into the formula and you get the same quality of answer.
• Veggie ROI Calculator ✓ every zone Pulls live supermarket prices from a national scraper. Works the same whether you're in Darwin or Hobart.

You don't have to run all eight. That is not so easy when you're just starting, pick the ones that solve the problem you actually have. New grower? Start with Crop Planner and Companion Planting (both universal, both easy). Killed three rounds of tomatoes to fungal rot? The Pest & Disease Risk Calculator and the Smart Watering Calculator will help if you're in SEQ; if you're elsewhere, read the thresholds in those tools as your personal checklist. Wondering if you're actually saving money? Go direct to the Veggie ROI Calculator, it works anywhere.

The toolkit is completely optional. If you already know your crops, your soil, and your watering rhythm, you can skip this entire step and jump straight to Garden Buddy. Nothing in Step 3 depends on having run the toolkit, it's a "go deeper when you want to" layer, not a gatekeeper.

Open the Garden Toolkit →

Step 3, Track Everything in Garden Buddy

This is where the "Seed to Plate" promise actually gets delivered. Garden Buddy is your private grow log, a succession planting tracker that sits inside your dayboro.au account and records every planting batch, every care activity, every harvest, and every kilo saved against the supermarket price. Nothing is public. It's not social. It's your patch, your data, your running tally.

Once you've decided what you want to grow from Step 1 (and optionally sharpened the plan in Step 2), this is where you enter those vegetables. Manually at the moment, pick the plant, pick the date you sowed or transplanted, and Garden Buddy handles the rest.

Video 1, Adding a vegetable to your private Garden Buddy

The first walkthrough shows exactly how fast it is to add something. You pick the vegetable from the database, set the date, and it's in your garden. Takes around twenty seconds.

Video 2, The full detail view for every plant

Once something's in your garden, tap it to see the full picture. Expected harvest window, current soil and air conditions, what's working for that plant this week, care logging, harvest recording, and the running savings total.

Waht Garden Buddy gives you

• Completely private garden, nobody else sees your plants, your data, or your harvest log
• New planting batches with one tap entry and backdating for things already in the ground
• Care activity logging (water, feed, mulch, weed, treat) so you can see what worked
• Moving plants between beds and succession planting groups
• Harvest recording in kilos, bunches or count, whatever suits the crop
• Running supermarket savings total, every harvest is priced against live national supermarket data
• Per plant growing guide from the plant database (works for any climate) + live weather readout from our Dayboro station
• Works on phone, tablet, or desktop, same account, everywhere

Open Garden Buddy →

Why It's Private, Not Social

A fair question: why not make Garden Buddy a public feed? Photos, comments, likes, the usual playbook. I thought about it and decided against it for one simple reason. The people I know who actually grow their own food don't want to post about it. They want to grow it, eat it, and know whether it was worth the effort.

Garden Buddy is for the quiet grower. The one who wants a better record of what worked last year, not a bigger follower count. If you ever want to share something publicly you can screenshot it and do it yourself, your patch stays yours by default.

Is Growing Your Own Actually Worth It?

This is the question I get most, and it's a fair one. If a lettuce costs $3 at Coles, and it takes ten weeks of watering and weeding to grow one at home, are you actually ahead? The honest answer: sometimes yes, sometimes no, and it depends on the vegetable.

Some crops are ridiculously good value in almost every zone: cherry tomatoes, silverbeet, leafy herbs, spring onions, chillies, zucchini. Others barely break even because the shop price per kilo is already rock bottom: potatoes, pumpkins, onions. The Veggie ROI Calculator, same one that's step 8 of the toolkit, tells you which is which, honestly, with the data behind it.

Use it early to decide what to plant, then use Garden Buddy to keep the running score as you harvest.

What's Free and What Needs Membership

Most of this is free. The Veggie Guide is free for all seven zones. The Zone Selector is free. The eight calculators in the toolkit are free. Garden Buddy itself is available to anyone with a dayboro.au account, free tier included, with the members tier unlocking the deeper features (unlimited batches, multi bed tracking, harvest history, long range forecast integration, and the auto add from zone pages when it ships).

Membership is what keeps the whole system running, the weather station, the supermarket price scrapers, the planting database, and the development of new features. It's priced at the cost of a single takeaway coffee a month.

A Note From the Ridge

A bit of honesty about where this came from. The first version of "Seed to Plate" started years ago when I was still running TradeShack, and the early builds of the weather and garden tools were very much anchored to Dayboro, the subtropical ridge I've been watching since 2004. That's where the weather station still lives, and it's the reason our subtropical data is as sharp as it is.

But the planting database covers all of Australia. The supermarket price scrapers run nationally. Four of the eight toolkit calculators are pure maths and chemistry, zone agnostic by design. So over the last couple of years we opened the whole system up, seven grow zones, seven dedicated veggie guides, one shared toolkit, one private tracker. The four weather driven tools are still fed from our Dayboro station (the honest bit, I'd rather tell you than pretend), but the zone guides, the universal calculators, the ROI analysis and the private Garden Buddy tracking work the same whether you garden in Darwin, Dayboro, Canberra, or Albany.

If you've been waiting for a practical, Australian, zone aware grow your-own workflow that takes you from picking the seed to plating the harvest, this is it. Start with Step 1, and let me know if there's a feature you want added. I build this stuff for the people who actually use it.