About

About Growmanac

Growmanac answers one question properly: what can I grow where I actually live, and when? Most planting tools assume you are in the United States. This one works anywhere on Earth, because it starts from your location's real climate record rather than a zone map. It is built and written by one person, and it is free.

Why it exists

If you have ever looked up "when to plant tomatoes", you have met the problem: the answer is confidently stated, and it is for somewhere else. Sowing calendars are written for a hemisphere, a country, sometimes a single state. Follow one from the wrong place and you plant a month early and lose the lot.

The fix is not more advice. It is starting from where you stand: your frost dates, your season length, your summer heat — and working forward from those to a plan with dates on it. That is the whole idea, and everything on the site serves it.

How the planner works

You type a place. Your browser asks Open-Meteo for that location's historical climate record, and the site works out your likely last spring frost, first autumn frost and season length from it. Each crop carries its own requirements — how much season it needs, whether it tolerates frost, whether it sulks in heat — and the planner matches the two, then counts backwards from your frost dates to say when to sow.

It runs entirely in your browser. Nothing about your garden is sent to us, because we have nowhere to send it — there is no account and no database. See the privacy policy for the precise version.

Where the information comes from

• Climate: Open-Meteo's historical reanalysis — a global record, no API key, no account, so it works the same for a balcony in Lisbon and a field in New Zealand.
• Crop requirements: established horticultural ranges (days to maturity, frost tolerance, heat behaviour), kept per crop so a correction fixes one file rather than a dozen pages.
• Guides: written from the underlying agronomy, cited where a specific claim deserves a source, and dated so you can see how fresh a page is.

What we will not do

• Pretend to certainty we don't have. Growing advice is guidance, not a guarantee. Your microclimate, soil and water beat any model — a south wall or a frost pocket can move your real dates by weeks. Where the honest answer is "it depends, and here is what it depends on", we say that.
• No foraging, edibility or health claims. We do not tell you what is safe to eat or what a plant will do to your body. Those questions deserve a specialist, not a website.
• No mass-produced pages. Few but full. A thin page that ranks is still a page that wasted your time.
• Recommendations are not for sale. Some links earn a commission — see the affiliate disclosure — and none of them buy a place in the advice. If the honest answer is "you don't need to buy anything", that is what you will read.

Who writes it

Oğuz Demir — a software engineer in İzmir, Türkiye, on LinkedIn. One person, working on this steadily rather than quickly, and growing food while doing it.

I am not a horticulturist, and I am not going to pretend to be one. I studied Manufacturing Engineering at Istanbul Technical University and I build software for a living, which shapes this site more than any gardening credential would: the planner is a tested engine rather than a table someone typed out, every crop's requirements live in one file so a correction fixes every page at once, and the guides cite their sources because I had to look them up myself.

What I do have is the same starting point you probably have — a small space, a real climate, and a genuine wish to grow something edible in it. That means the site gets things wrong sometimes and fixes them: the planner has been corrected more than once because a real season did not match what it predicted. It also means you are reading something written by someone who has to live with the answer, not generated at volume.

If you find an error, telling us is genuinely useful: include the place and the crop, and we can reproduce it. Get in touch.

Growmanac · self-sufficient living, tools first. Guidance, not a guarantee. Last updated 2026-08-06.