Passing along from the Advocates for Urban Agriculture list-serv — a cool new resource (born in Australia) for urban gardeners: Cityfood Growers

Here’s what they say about themselves:

Planting made easy 

With the burgeoning interest of city dwellers in growing their own food, one of the key challenges to food gardeners has been resolved with the USA release of the www.cityfoodgrowers.com organic gardening web site.  

At the click of mouse, gardeners from any town or city in all USA states can select by day, month or plant on the correct times to plant, cultivate or harvest their food plants. The web site stores temperatures from over 4000 weather monitoring points in the USA, temperature profiles of 130 of the most common plants grown by USA hobby food gardeners and daily planetary information for the northern hemisphere.   

Food gardeners will no longer need to use the complicated and sometimes inaccurate broad zonal planting systems. The web site allows for localisation of the garden climate profile down to the level of town and city and even suburb within large cities. As an example, the state of Illinois has 180 weather monitoring points and 4 within its largest city of Chicago. This localisation greatly improves the potential for successful planting. For gardeners interested in taking advantage of planetary forces, such as moon planting and biodynamic planting data, the web site integrates the often complex planetary information directly into the planting calendar. The web site also provides localisation for Australia and New Zealand. 

When a food gardener starts using the web site, they create a local temperature profile for their garden and can even provide for shade factors in their garden and vary this over the year as the sun’s position changes with the seasons. When they use the site planting calendar, their search result will display when it is ideal to work with a plant on a month or day. It will also show which months during growing period when the gardener should expect extremes of heat or cold so they can take some precautions in advance to protect their food plants.