Trubus Online
The digital nursery for serious growers
Issue No. 178 · Autumn Edition
Enter your ZIP and the Trubus Plant Care Calendar returns a 52-week task list keyed to your last and first frost dates, your USDA zone, and the specific microclimate quirks our horticulturists have mapped for your county. No seed-packet guesswork. No generic zone charts.
Featured this week
A representative week
Below is one spring week from a real Trubus calendar for ZIP 97214 — Portland, Oregon, USDA Zone 8b. Every entry is sourced from our horticulturist-reviewed task library and adjusted for the cool, wet springs of the Willamette Valley. Free users see two tasks per week; Trubus+ members see the full eight.
Soil has held above 50°F for five consecutive days. Sow snap peas 1 inch deep, 2 inches apart; thin radishes to 3 inches. Mulch lightly to slow slug pressure that peaks this week in the Willamette Valley.
Move trays outdoors for one hour in dappled shade, increasing by 90 minutes daily. Bring in if nights drop below 45°F. Our horticulturists flag this as the highest-mortality week for warm-season transplants.
Three real gardens
A calendar that says "sow tomatoes in May" is useless to a Zone 4a grower with a 90-day season. The Trubus calendar adjusts to where you garden, what you grow, and the constraints that shape your week.
Persona · Balcony tomato grower
Maya's calendar collapses the standard tomato timeline by 18 days and surfaces our indoor pre-sprout protocol so she can hit the short window between last frost and first hard heat. The week she transplants is the week she goes on vacation — the calendar flags that automatically and shifts feeding by four days.
“It's the only calendar that knows my HOA won't let me put up a hoop house.”
Persona · Perennial border planner
David's calendar sequences pruning across 38 woody perennials so the Chelsea chop, the June lily cut-back, and the late-summer aster pinch never collide. Each task links to the cultivar's plant profile, so he never has to leave the calendar to look up a pruning window.
“I used to carry a notebook. Now I just check Tuesday's email.”
Persona · Indoor seed-starting hobbyist
Reema's calendar tracks the 10-week onion countdown from the day she sows, with weekly thinned-by dates, light-height adjustments, and the specific week our horticulturists recommend she top-dress with worm castings. She trades starts through the Seed Swap and the calendar flags varieties her ZIP hasn't grown yet.
“The Seed Swap panel inside the calendar is unreasonably good.”
Behind the calendar
Planting windows aren't opinions. They're the product of two decades of accumulated field data, peer-reviewed literature, and weekly checks against what actually survived last winter in your county.
Practical questions
Our frost dates are drawn from 20-year NOAA climate normals and refined county-by-county against the submissions of 6,200 Soil Lab participants since 2018. We publish the source dataset for every ZIP and update it each January when the new normals release.
The ZIP-keyed tool is currently U.S.-only. Trubus+ members in Canada, the UK, and the EU can switch the calendar to postal-code mode, which keys to national climate grids rather than last/first frost dates. Australian and New Zealand coverage is in beta for spring 2026.
Free users get two preview tasks per week, the current week's planting calendar, and one ZIP at a time. Trubus+ members get the full eight tasks, the 52-week archive, the cultivar-specific pruning windows, the Seed Swap integration, and unlimited ZIPs (handy for planning a second property).
Every Seed Swap listing carries a linked plant profile, and the calendar surfaces the varieties trending in your ZIP each week. Soil Lab results drop directly into your calendar as a tailored amendment schedule, so a low-magnesium reading becomes a specific week-19 task instead of a vague "feed more."
Two ways to follow Trubus
Trubus+ unlocks the full 52-week archive, cultivar-specific pruning windows, the Seed Swap inside the calendar, and the Soil Lab amendment schedule. The Grower's Briefing delivers one tightly edited task list to your inbox every Sunday morning — written by a horticulturist, not an algorithm.
The full calendar, every plant profile, every Soil Lab interpretation.
38,000 members. 1.4 million monthly readers. 15 years independent.
A weekly task list for your ZIP, written by a horticulturist. Free.
Sundays. One task list. Zero filler. Unsubscribe with one click.