Planting calendar by ZIP code

How to read your planting calendar

The top of the tool shows the numbers every date is built on: your hardiness zone, your average last and first frost, and the NOAA weather station they come from. Below that, What to do in the next 4 weeks is a checklist of the windows that are open now or open soon. Tick off what you have done; the ticks stay on this device and reset for the next season. To see what spring will bring while it is still fall, pick another date under Plan from another date.

In the planting timeline each row is one plant, laid out from January to December and grouped by plant family (the colored dot is the family, the same colors as in the garden planner). Fold a family away to shorten the list. The colored bars are the windows when a job is worth doing:

• Start indoors (blue): sow seeds in pots under lights, weeks before they can go outside.
• Plant out (dark green): move those seedlings, or nursery transplants, into the garden.
• Sow outdoors (light green): seed straight into the bed.
• Plant for fall (brown): a second sowing in summer that matures in the cool weeks before your first frost.
• Harvest (thin gold bar): roughly when to expect a crop if you plant at the start of the window.

The two dashed blue lines are your average last spring frost and average first fall frost. The lighter dashed line is the date after which only one spring in ten still has a frost; tender seedlings planted between the two lines may need covering on a cold night. Click or tap a plant for its exact windows, harvest time and the rule behind them. Switch to Month by month for the same dates as a to-do list.

Where the dates come from

Every date starts from two numbers: the average last frost in spring and the average first frost in fall. We take them from the NOAA U.S. Climate Normals for 1991–2020, using the nearest of 7,305 weather stations to the center of your ZIP code. “Average” here means the 50% date: in half of years the last spring frost came later than that. The frost dates page also shows the safer 10% dates.

Each plant then has a window measured in weeks from those dates, based on extension planting guides. Tomatoes, for example, are started indoors six to eight weeks before the last frost and planted out one to three weeks after it. Warm-season crops also wait for warmth: we hold back tomatoes, peppers, beans, squash and melons until your normal daily average temperature reaches the soil temperature each one needs (55 to 65°F). In cool-summer places such as western Washington this moves tomatoes several weeks later than a frost-only rule would.

Treat the dates as a starting point. A station can sit on a warm airport runway while your garden is in a frost pocket at the bottom of a hill, and mountains and coasts change quickly over a few miles. If your garden is usually a week behind your town, plant a week later.

Cool-season and warm-season crops

Use the filters to split the calendar in two. Of our 55 plants, 35 are cool-season crops that shrug off light frost: peas, spinach, lettuce, broccoli, kale, carrots, radishes, onions and others. They go in early in spring, slow down or bolt in summer heat, and often do even better as a fall crop.

The other 20 are warm-season crops that a single frost kills: tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, zucchini, bush beans, sweet corn, basil and the rest. Planting them early gains nothing, because cold soil stalls them and seeds rot. Wait for the plant-out window even if a warm week in April tempts you.

A gardening calendar in five steps

Whatever your ZIP code, the year runs in the same order. Only the dates move.

1. 10 to 12 weeks before the last frost: start onions, leeks, celery, peppers and eggplant indoors. These need the longest head start.
2. 6 to 8 weeks before: start tomatoes, broccoli, cabbage, sage and chives indoors. Toward the end of this stretch, sow peas and spinach outdoors as soon as the soil can be worked.
3. 2 to 4 weeks before: plant out brassica seedlings and onions, sow carrots, beets, lettuce and radishes. Start cucumbers and squash indoors if you want a head start.
4. 1 to 4 weeks after: once nights stay warm, plant out tomatoes, peppers and eggplant, and sow beans, corn, squash and cucumbers.
5. 6 to 14 weeks before the first fall frost: sow or plant the fall crop, starting with broccoli and cabbage and ending with kale, beets and turnips. Plant garlic in the four weeks before the first frost for a harvest next summer.

For exact indoor dates for every crop, use the seed starting calculator.

Planting where frost is rare

In South Florida, the Rio Grande Valley, Hawaii and parts of coastal Southern California, freezing nights are too rare for NOAA to calculate frost dates. The calendar turns upside down: fall and winter are the main season for lettuce, greens, peas, brassicas and root crops, and warm-season crops are planted from late winter so they fruit before the hottest weeks. In Florida and along the Gulf Coast, many gardeners plant a second round of tomatoes, peppers and beans in late summer. In those areas the tool shows typical planting months and seasonal advice instead of a chart, and your county extension office has the most precise local schedule.

Make the calendar yours

• Only my plan: if you have drawn beds in the garden planner on this device, one tap narrows the calendar to the plants in your plan.
• Print it: download a PDF on Letter, A4 or larger paper and pin it up by the seed-starting shelf.
• Put it in your phone: the .ics files add each window as an all-day event, for the next four weeks or the whole year.
• Sow in batches: for quick crops such as radishes, lettuce and bush beans, sow a short row every two or three weeks inside the window instead of all at once.

For plant-by-plant detail, open any plant guide, for example tomatoes or garlic, and check which crops grow well side by side in the companion planting chart.