The Kitchen Garden Almanac
Nearly every planting guide is written for the whole country at once, which is another way of saying it is wrong nearly everywhere. Basil goes into the ground on a different week in Nashville than in Minneapolis.
Choose your hardiness zone below and the entire year is reckoned again — ten herbs, sowing to last cutting, from the frost dates outward.
The sowing chart
Choose your USDA hardiness zone
Sowing, setting out and cutting
What this chart is, honestly
A USDA hardiness zone records one thing only — how cold your winter gets. It does not encode frost dates, and two gardens in the same zone can sit a fortnight apart on the calendar because one is coastal and the other is not.
So the frost dates above are not the zone's averages. They are measured — thirty years of daily minima, 1995 to 2024, at four places in each zone — and reported at the cautious end: a spring date a late frost beats only one year in ten. Planting on an average date loses the crop half the time, which is why almanacs have never printed the average.
Two things you should hear from us rather than discover. The autumn dates run a few days optimistic, because the gridded record they come from under-detects the still, clear nights when frost actually forms; treat the first-frost date as roughly a week earlier than shown. And the sowing intervals — how many weeks before the frost to start each seed — are not yet from a checked source, unlike the frost dates themselves. That is the next thing being put right.
A guide that hedges across every climate is a list of plant names, and you already know the plant names.
Frost dates are checkable facts, and getting one wrong costs somebody a tray of seedlings in April.
Thirteen zones is thirteen documents. The honest way to choose the order is to ask which are wanted.
The muster
The chart above is the zone average. The printable is reckoned from your own first and last frost, sized for the refrigerator door, and free. We are drawing them one zone at a time and starting with whichever is asked for most — so naming yours is a vote.
One message, once, when yours is finished. No list, no newsletter, no second letter.