Planting Date & Sow & Harvest, Either Way

It links your sowing date, transplant date and harvest date through the crop's duration. Tell it the harvest date you're aiming for and it works backwards to the sowing date; tell it the sowing date and it works forwards to the harvest date. Either way you get a clear timeline so you can plan the season around a market window or weather.

Pick the date you want to harvest — often to hit a price peak or a market window — and the tool subtracts the crop's duration: sow date = harvest date − crop duration. For a transplanted crop it also backs out the nursery time so you know when to start the seedlings as well as when to set them out.

Enter the date you'll sow and the crop duration, and the tool adds them: harvest date = sow date + crop duration. For transplanted crops it adds the nursery days to give the transplant date, then runs the duration from there to the harvest date.

Many crops — tomato, chilli, onion, brassicas, paddy — are raised in a nursery first and then moved to the field. The transplant date = sow date + nursery days. The main crop duration is usually counted from transplanting, so handling the nursery period separately keeps the harvest date accurate.

Use the days-to-maturity on the seed packet or variety guide, which is the typical field duration from sowing (or from transplanting for transplanted crops). The tool lets you enter your own value because duration depends heavily on variety, so the packet figure for your exact variety is the most reliable starting point.

Crop duration is variety- and weather-dependent. Warmth speeds growth and cool spells slow it, so the same variety can mature noticeably faster in a hot season than a cool one. Treat the calculated dates as a strong plan, then adjust in the field as the crop tells you how it's actually progressing.

Alongside the dates the tool shows the crop duration in weeks, which is an easy way to compare crops, slot successions a fixed number of weeks apart, and sanity-check a packet figure. Weeks also map neatly onto farm routines and market days for planning the season.

Yes — run it once per planting. Decide your harvest windows a couple of weeks apart, back-calculate the sowing date for each, and you get a staggered sowing schedule that keeps produce coming steadily instead of all at once. It's just as useful forwards for spacing out sowings you've already planned.

They're solid planning dates. Real maturity shifts with weather, soil, variety and management, and transplanted crops can check briefly after planting out. Use the dates to set your plan and book your market window, then watch the crop and fine-tune — planting-date planning is about steering the season, not exact prediction.

Yes — enter the duration and nursery time for your crop and it works anywhere, for grains, vegetables, pulses or fodder, in any growing season. Pair it with a local crop calendar and frost dates to make sure your sowing and harvest windows fall within the safe growing period for your area.