Leaftide detects your hemisphere from your garden location. When you set a Southern Hemisphere location, the app automatically uses July as the season start month. Because July is month 7 or later, the hemisphere logic treats the garden as Southern Hemisphere and applies the correct seasonal calendar throughout the app.
Most gardening software is built for the Northern Hemisphere and quietly assumes everyone plants in spring (March to May), harvests in autumn (September to October), and goes dormant in December. If you garden in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, or the Southern Cone of South America, that assumption breaks everything.
Your spring is their autumn. Your summer is their winter. A sowing calendar that says “start tomatoes in April” is useless, or actively misleading, if your April is heading into autumn frost.
Leaftide’s season calendar handles this directly. Here is how it works.
How Leaftide detects your hemisphere
When you add a location in the Southern Hemisphere, Leaftide automatically sets July as your season start month. July falls in the 7–12 range that the app uses to infer Southern Hemisphere, so the seasonal calendar, month ordering, and care routine adjustments all follow immediately.
The inference rule is simple: season start in months 7 through 12 means Southern Hemisphere, months 1 through 6 means Northern Hemisphere.
How seasons are mapped in the south
Once Leaftide knows you are in the Southern Hemisphere, it applies the correct season calendar throughout the app:
| Season | Southern Hemisphere months |
|---|---|
| Spring | September, October, November |
| Summer | December, January, February |
| Autumn | March, April, May |
| Winter | June, July, August |
This gives the app the correct month groupings for its season labels, colours, and calendar context. A Southern Hemisphere calendar therefore treats September to November as spring and December to February as summer.
Cross-year seasons and how dates are calculated
Here is where Southern Hemisphere support gets genuinely tricky: your growing season spans two calendar years.
If your season starts in July 2025, its calendar boundary runs to June 2026. The 12 displayed planning months are July through June, and summer (December, January, and February) straddles the year boundary.
Leaftide calculates month windows correctly when they cross New Year. When a window’s end month is earlier in the calendar than its start month, such as December to February, the calculator places the end date in the following calendar year. A summer window for a 2025/26 season starts on 1 December 2025 and ends on 28 February 2026.
The season is labelled 2025/26 rather than just 2025 or 2026, which makes the cross-year sequence explicit.
A full 12-month planning sequence
Leaftide orders 12 months from the season start month. With July as the start, the sequence runs July through June, and the next season begins in July of the following year.
Care routines that actually match your calendar
Leaftide’s built-in month-based care routines use Northern Hemisphere month windows as their source. When one of those routines is adopted for a Southern Hemisphere garden, its start and end months are shifted by six months.
A routine defined for March therefore becomes September. A November window becomes May. Stage-based routines work differently: instructions tied to flowering, fruiting, planting out, or harvest remain attached to that stage rather than being forced onto a calendar month.
This removes the basic six-month calendar mismatch while preserving routines that depend on what the plant is actually doing.
Sowing windows and frost dates
Leaftide’s planting predictions use the garden’s own location and dates rather than assuming that a Northern Hemisphere date can simply be copied six months later. Frost information can constrain sowing and transplant timing, while growing degree day calculations use climate normals for the garden’s latitude, longitude, and actual dates.
The hemisphere-aware season calendar keeps those results in the right planning sequence. The climate-based sowing dates article explains the wider prediction system.
Setting up your garden
When you add a Southern Hemisphere location to your garden, Leaftide automatically selects July as the season start. That single step is all that is needed for the hemisphere detection, season calendar, and care routine month shifts to take effect.
Once your location is set, the app uses it for season labels, month ordering, care routine month windows, and planning context. Location-based prediction inputs continue to use your garden’s actual climate and dates.
Add your location and see your real growing calendar.
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If you want to understand how sowing windows are calculated from your local climate data, the climate-based sowing dates article explains the full system. For frost date guidance that applies to both hemispheres, see the last frost date guide.