What to Plant Now

Use local frost dates, current temperatures, available light, and crop timing to make a responsible seasonal choice.

Why this site cannot give you a date

Planting time depends on your local frost dates, your season length, and what the weather is actually doing — none of which a general reference knows about you. Anyone giving you a specific sowing date without knowing where you are is guessing. What we can give you is the method for finding the right answer locally.

Find your local frost dates

Your last spring frost and first autumn frost bracket the outdoor season. Local Extension services, national meteorological services, and regional gardening organisations publish these for your area. Almost all sowing guidance is expressed relative to those two dates, so finding them once makes every seed packet legible.

Read the packet against those dates

Seed packets give days to maturity and usually a sowing window relative to frost. Count backwards from your first autumn frost to check a crop has time to finish, and forwards from your last spring frost for anything cold-sensitive. A crop needing 90 days will not finish if you sow it 60 days before the season ends.

Cool-season and warm-season crops

Lettuce, spinach, peas, radishes, chard, kale, and cilantro grow best in cooler conditions and often bolt in midsummer heat, so they suit spring and autumn. Tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, beans, and basil need warm soil and warm nights, and sowing them early into cold conditions usually gains nothing.

Containers shift the picture slightly

Pots warm faster than ground in spring, which can allow a slightly earlier start, but they also cool faster on cold nights and offer roots no insulation. Portable containers are an advantage here: you can move them under cover when a late frost is forecast rather than gambling on the date.

When in doubt, sow small and repeat

Rather than committing everything to one date, sow a small batch, wait two or three weeks, and sow again. You spread the risk of a bad start, you avoid harvesting an entire crop in a single week, and you learn what your own space does at different points in the season.