A common question when it comes to planting a garden is “When do I start?”
It’s a simple enough question, but the answer is not as simple. It depends on what plants you’re growing, how you are growing them, and where you live.
Before you can put those seeds in the ground (or pot), you will need to know when to plant each seed or seedling. As much as I would love to give you exact dates and times to plant, it varies from person to person and place to place. So I will give you the tools you need to make your own customized planting calendar.
If you’ve been following this blog series, you should already have made a list of plants to grow, figured out which hardiness zone you live in, and bought your seeds. If you haven’t done those things yet, go back and check out those posts (you can click the links right above, or find them at the bottom of this post).
Also, if you don’t have a way to store and organize your seeds yet, check out my post on seed storage and organization!
Find Your Calendar of Choice
The first thing that you need to do is find a garden calendar. There are several options for this. If you are a digital type person, you can download a gardening app or use your Google or Apple calendar.
If you prefer a written calendar, you can take a look at my Garden Planner to use specifically for gardening, use your own personal calendar, or buy a large desktop calendar* from Amazon, with lots of room to write.
Determine your Frost Dates
Farmer’s Almanac has several wonderful tools for gardening. One of their tools will tell you your area’s estimated last and first frost dates. This will be the basis for your planting dates.
Cool Season Crops vs. Warm Season Crops
As you are planning your planting calendar, you will find that some seeds can be planted when it is still pretty cold outside. These plants are cool season crops. They are cold hardy, and can handle light freezes, and sometimes even heavy freezes. These plants can be harvested in the spring and fall. Examples of these plants would be spinach, kale, sweet peas, radishes, etc.
Other plants must be planted once the danger of freezing is past because they cannot handle freezing temperatures. These plants are warm season crops. Some of these plants are tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, corn, etc.
It’s important to know which type of plant your seeds are before you start them. If you plant cool season crops too late, they can bolt (go to seed) before it’s time to harvest because the temperatures are too warm.
Plant Dates for Seeds
To figure out when to plant your seeds, there are a couple different methods. You could look at this Farmer’s Almanac tool, which will give you general dates of when to plant based on your area’s frost dates as well as the moon phases.
The second option is to look at your seed packets and let them tell you when to plant. These guidelines will be more accurate to the variety that you have.
Your seed packet should give some sort of instruction such as “Start seeds indoors 4-6 weeks before the last frost”, or “Direct sow after danger of frost”, or, for your cool weather crops, “Direct sow 8-10 weeks before the last frost”.
Sometimes they will tell you to sow at a certain time of year, such as “spring to early summer” or “late summer”.
Some packets may even have a zones map with ranges of dates to plant.
Once you have found your instructions, calculate the date range from your frost dates and make a note of that range beside that plant on your list of plants to grow. Also note whether you are supposed to start them indoors or direct sow. If they give a date to transplant your seedlings that you have started indoors, write that down as well (if they don’t, you will want to research when to plant those starts). Lastly, make a note of the days to maturity.
If for some reason, your seed packet does not have planting directions on it, you can google the species and the variety with “planting dates”, and you should be able to find directions on it.
Making these notes on your list of plants to grow ensures that all of your planting information will be in one place, so that you don’t have to go searching through your calendar or seed packets to find dates.
Plant Dates for Store-Bought Starts
Buying starts can be a super simple way to get started gardening! They have already grown to the size they need to be so that you can get a good amount of produce from them during the season, they have most likely already been hardened off, and you don’t have to have the space or setup for starting seeds indoors.
Keep an eye on your local nurseries or stores to know what is ready to go in the ground. Generally, they will be ready to plant if they are being sold in your area.
That being said, you definitely don’t want to plant any warm season crops until the danger of frost is past, or any cool season crops during warm weather. This is why it’s important to know which plants are warm season and which ones are cool season crops.
I recommend using the Farmer’s Almanac tool to know when your starts can be transplanted, and then going to the store or nursery and buying what you are looking for when it’s time to plant them. Don’t forget to write transplant dates on your list when you do your research!
Doing this will allow you to plan out your planting dates on your calendar to help you keep on track.
Filling out your Calendar
Now comes the fun part!
Using the notes on your list, add all the dates to your calendar. Here are some tips for keeping your calendar organized:
1. Write everything in pencil.
You may “schedule” a planting day ahead of time, but when that date comes closer, it’s been raining all week and the ground is saturated. You need to be able to erase and “reschedule” if needed.
2. Choose to “schedule” dates or date ranges.
If you’re like me, you may need to have specific dates where you plan to set aside time to plant. This way I know that on Saturday, I am going to plant (as long as weather permits).
Or you may prefer to write date ranges on your calendar, rather than specific dates. This gives you a little more flexibility to figure out what will work best with your schedule and the weather during that range of time.
3. Use codes to make the notes on your calendar more concise. Write code with a list of the plants that you are working with. You can use these codes if you would like:
SS = start seeds indoors
DS = direct sow seeds outdoors
TP = transplant starts
SP = succession plant (we’ll talk more about this later)
M = date of estimated maturity
For example, on April 15, you might write:
“SS: tomatoes, bell peppers”
4. Highlight as you complete each event.
Doing this will allow you to easily see what you have already done, as well keep it easy to see so you can go back and look later if needed.
Hopefully this helps you get your garden calendar organized. Next, you get to start your seeds, whether you do that indoors, or direct sow, or both!
*As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. This means that if you purchase an Amazon product from a link that I share, I will receive a small commission, at no extra cost to you! Thank you for supporting me!
I’d love to hear what other tips you have for planning your garden calendar!
Posts in this series:
