For gardens in the UK
Seed packets don't know where you live.
Last frost lands eleven weeks apart across these islands — early March in the Channel Islands, late May in the Highlands. Plot moves every sowing, planting, harvest and pruning date to your postcode area, then tells you what this week's weather means for the plants you actually have.
Available for download
14 days free, no card. Then £24.99 a year. Then £24.99 a year. Works offline and installs like an app.
- Last frost
- First frost
- Growing season
The problem
One national calendar, twelve different climates
"Sow after the last frost" is sound advice attached to a date that moves by nearly three months depending on where you are standing. Plot divides the UK into twelve growing zones built from Met Office long-term averages and the RHS frost map, then maps all 124 postcode areas onto them.
The gap is not a rounding error. The mildest zone gets a 260-day growing season. The Highlands and Islands get 120. That is the difference between a second sowing of French beans and no beans at all.
- Sowing and planting shift with your zone's last frost week.
- Harvest and first-frost work shift with your zone's first frost week.
- Pruning is deliberately not shifted. It follows the plant's dormancy and flowering wood, not your frost dates — moving it would be wrong.
- 245
- crops and ornamentals, each with its own dates
- 124
- UK postcode areas mapped to a growing zone
- 11
- weeks between the earliest and latest last frost
- 10
- day local forecast, read as actions not numbers
What it does
Four things, done properly
Weather warnings that name your plants
Most apps show you a forecast and leave the thinking to you. Plot reads ten days of local data and only speaks up when something should change what you do — then tells you which of your plants is at risk.
- Forecast for your full postcode. Enter the whole postcode and the ten-day forecast and frost alerts are read for that location, not a regional average. Planning dates — the sowing and planting weeks — stay based on your postcode area’s growing zone. Give just the first part and you get the area forecast, clearly labelled as approximate.
- Ground frost, not just air frost. The Met Office rule is that 0-4°C on a clear, still night means frost by morning. Plot combines the overnight low with cloud cover and wind gusts across the whole 21:00-08:00 window, so it catches the frosts a simple "below zero" test misses.
- It knows what you planted. If your plan has tomatoes, courgettes and basil in it, the frost warning names them.
- Soil temperature, not air. Direct sowing wants soil above 7°C at 6cm. Plot watches that and gives you a green light when it arrives.
- Also heat above 28°C, gales above 55km/h, heavy rain, and dry spells where nothing gets watered for you.
A year you can see at a glance
Put your beds and containers in once. Plot works out what fits, then draws the whole season as bands you can read in a second.
- Timeline — sow, plant out and harvest windows for everything, week by week.
- Succession — where a second or third sowing genuinely fits in your season, not a generic one.
- Rotation — which bed each family should go in, and what followed what.
- This month — a short list of what to actually do now, with the weather card on top.
The dates come to you
A planner you have to remember to open is a planner you stop opening. Plot puts your year into the calendar you already look at every day — and keeps it there, current, without you doing anything.
- Subscribe once. Add one link to Apple Calendar, Google Calendar or Outlook and every sowing, planting, harvest and pruning date appears alongside the rest of your life.
- It follows your plan. Add a crop in July, tick a sowing off, change your postcode — the calendar updates itself. It is a live feed, not a file you exported in March and forgot about.
- Dates that are actually yours. The entries carry your postcode area's timings, so "sow broad beans" lands in the right week for your garden rather than a national average.
- Or take a snapshot. Prefer a one-off download? The whole year comes as a standard .ics file that works anywhere.
We read the published pages of twelve other planners — GrowVeg, GrowDo, VegPlotter, Leaftide, RHS Grow, Gardenize, Planter, Gardenate and the rest. None of them documents a calendar you can subscribe to, and most document no calendar export at all. If one has it unpublished, we have not found it.
- Mon 4Sow French beans outdoors
- Tue 12Plant out tomatoes
- Wed 13Dentist, 9:30
- Mon 18Prune spring shrubs (group 1)
- Tue 26First lettuce harvest
Ornamentals treated as seriously as vegetables
Nearly every planner stops at vegetables. Plot covers 122 flowers, shrubs, climbers and trees with their own planting, flowering and pruning windows — including the pruning group, which is where most shrubs get ruined.
- Pruning calendar by month, so you stop cutting next year's flowers off.
- Flowering windows so you can plan for colour across the whole season.
- Browsable sub-categories rather than one list of 122 Latin names.
What's inside
245 plants, sorted so you can find them
123 vegetables, herbs and fruit. 122 flowers, shrubs, climbers and trees. Each one carries its own sowing, planting, harvest, flowering and pruning windows, spacing, and whether it is frost tender — 26 of the crops and 12 of the ornamentals are.
Also included
- Your calendar, kept up to date — subscribe once and every sowing, planting, harvest and pruning date appears in Apple Calendar, Google Calendar or Outlook, and keeps following your plan as it changes. Or download the year as a one-off .ics file.
- Installs like an app — add it to your home screen on iPhone or Android and it opens full screen.
- Works with no signal — the whole planner is cached, which matters on an allotment.
- Your plan lives in the link — share it, bookmark it, or sign in and it syncs across devices.
- Light and dark — follows your phone.
Before you pay
What Plot is not
Every gardening app's marketing page tells you what it does. Here is what it doesn't, so you can decide before rather than after.
Zones, not your garden
Dates come from a twelve-zone model based on regional averages. A frost pocket at the bottom of your garden, a south wall, or a walled city centre will beat it. Treat Plot as a well-informed starting point, then adjust from what you observe.
A forecast is not a promise
The first three days of the weather card are reliable. The rest is a direction of travel. Plot says so on the card rather than presenting day ten as fact.
Some data is genuinely missing
37 perennials have no days-to-maturity figure because the concept does not apply, and a couple of plants have no reliable spacing. Those show as blank rather than as an invented number.
No pest or disease diagnosis
Plot will not identify a plant from a photo or tell you what is eating your brassicas. It plans time, not diagnosis.
Pricing
What you get
One price, one year, no tiers
One plan, one year, no tiers
Two weeks free with no card. After that it is £24.99 for a year — less than a tray of bedding plants. There is no locked tier: the trial is the whole planner. And no other planner we found, paid or free, will put your year into the calendar on your phone and keep it there. Two weeks free with no card. After that it is £24.99 for a year — less than a tray of bedding plants. There is no locked tier: the trial is the whole planner. And no other planner we found, paid or free, will put your year into the calendar on your phone and keep it there. Two weeks free with no card, and there is no locked tier — the trial is the whole planner. No other planner we found, paid or free, will put your year into the calendar on your phone and keep it there.
- Everything above. There is no locked tier.
- All 245 plants, all 124 postcode areas.
- Local weather warnings for your area.
- Your year in Apple Calendar, Google Calendar or Outlook, keeping itself up to date.
- Works offline, and installs like an app.
- Plan syncs across your devices.
- Cancel any time; no card needed to trial.
No card during the trial. You will be asked once, at the end of the fourteen days.
No card during the trial. After the fourteen days it is £24.99 a year through your Apple Account, renewing until you cancel. Cancel any time in Settings › Apple Account › Subscriptions.
No card needed, and none is asked for. After the fourteen days your plan, both plant libraries and this month's jobs stay usable; the dated views close.
Questions
Reasonable things to ask
Where do the dates actually come from?
Growing windows are compiled from RHS guidance and standard UK horticultural practice, then shifted by zone. The zones themselves are built from Met Office long-term regional averages and the RHS frost map. Every source is listed in the planner's footer, with links.
Weather comes from Open-Meteo, whose UK blend includes the Met Office UKMO model. Frost wording follows the Met Office's own definitions of ground and air frost.
Do I need an account?
To try it, no. Your plan is held in the page link, so you can build one and bookmark it without giving us anything. An account exists so the plan follows you between your phone and your laptop, and so it survives clearing your browser.
Signing in uses your email address and a password you choose. We store that email address and your plan, and you can delete the account and everything in it from inside the app. If you pay, we also keep a record of the payment — the amount, the date and the Stripe reference — because we have to keep that for tax. Delete your account and your email address is stripped out of that record too.
Can I get the dates into my own calendar?
Yes, and it is the thing Plot does that the other planners do not. You get a link you add once to Apple Calendar, Google Calendar or Outlook. Every sowing, planting out, harvest and pruning date for your postcode area then appears alongside the rest of your diary, and it keeps itself current — add a crop in July or tick a sowing off and the calendar follows.
Three honest caveats. The feed needs an account, because a subscription has to be served from somewhere. It only refreshes when you open Plot, so if you never come back it will still be showing this year next January. And calendar apps refresh on their own schedule — Google in particular can take a day or more to notice a change.
Treat the link like a password: anyone who has it can read your planting dates. You can reset it at any time, which instantly kills the old one. If you would rather not have a live feed at all, you can download the year as a one-off .ics file instead, and that needs no account.
Will it work on my allotment with no signal?
Yes. Once you have opened Plot the whole planner is cached on the device, so it opens and works offline. The weather card is the one part that needs a connection; when there isn't one it shows you the last forecast it fetched and says how old it is.
Is it an iPhone app?
It installs like one. Open Plot in Safari, tap Share, then Add to Home Screen, and it opens full screen with its own icon and no browser bars. Same on Android through Chrome. You are in it. Plot is on the App Store for iPhone and iPad, and on Google Play for Android. It also installs straight from the browser on any device — open plotapp.uk, add it to the home screen, and it opens full screen with its own icon.
My garden is milder than the app thinks. Can I override it?
You can pick any postcode area, so if a neighbouring zone matches your garden better you can use it. Per-plant date overrides are not in yet. If that matters to you, say so — it is near the top of the list.
What happens at the end of the fourteen days?
You are asked to pay once, and if you don't, your plan is not deleted — it stays readable, you just stop getting the weather warnings and the year ahead. Nothing auto-charges, because there is no card on file to charge.
Find out when your last frost really is
Two minutes to a plan. Two weeks free, and no card to get in.
Available for download