OUR APPROACH
Useful dates.
Clear roots.
Good garden advice tells you where it comes from, what it covers, and when to trust your own patch.
Start locally. Read the source.
Garden by Season is an independent planning tool for home vegetable gardeners. Browse local growing guides across the United States and Canada, or use the original fall planting calendars for five Texas regions and twelve crops. Local growing guides provide seasonal context; the Texas calendars separately show historical planting dates from Extension guidance.
What a date means here
We transcribe average fall planting dates from Table 1 of the Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Fall Vegetable Gardening Guide, EHT-056. Where Table 2 gives a separate last optimum date, we show it with its own label. We never invent an end date for a crop that has none in that table.
The source is a 2014 publication, checked for this collection on September 27, 2026. Checking the source does not turn historical guidance into a new forecast. Local Extension recommendations, variety maturity, soil conditions and actual weather should guide the decision to plant.
Open the original Extension guide (PDF) ↗How the five regions work
The region names used on this site are our plain-language labels for Regions I–V in Figure 1 on page 3. Cities below are locator labels shown inside those areas on that map. These are approximate regional references, not city-specific measurements or a ZIP-code lookup.
- Region I: Texas Panhandle. Amarillo.
- Region II: West Texas. Lubbock, El Paso.
- Region III: Central & East Texas. Austin, Dallas, Waco, Houston, San Antonio, College Station.
- Region IV: Coastal South Texas. Corpus Christi, Laredo.
- Region V: Rio Grande Valley. McAllen.
The map is historical. Its region numbers must not be substituted for today’s USDA hardiness zones. Hardiness describes winter cold; it does not by itself provide a vegetable planting calendar. If you garden near a boundary, consult the original map and your county Extension office.
What we add
We organize the data into crop and regional guides, compare the dates across regions, and provide editorial planning notes and a personal calendar. Care notes are general guidance, not claims of a local field trial. We are not affiliated with Texas A&M or any government agency.
Your plan belongs to you
My Garden saves crop, region, date and completion status in your browser. No account is required. Exported calendar events contain your chosen dates; they are not weather alerts and are not automatically updated if a source changes. Clearing browser storage removes your saved plan.
What a postal area means
Our United States locations use five-digit ZIP codes. Canadian locations use the first three characters of a postal code, called a Forward Sortation Area. These are postal reference areas, not precise neighborhood boundaries. Place names and representative coordinates come from GeoNames; some coordinates are estimated. Several place names can share one postal area.
GeoNames geographic data is made available under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. The source may contain omissions or outdated postal records. A listed area does not guarantee that every crop can grow outdoors there.
Nearby-area comparisons use the six nearest listed postal coordinates in the same country. Distances are approximate great-circle distances, rounded to 0.1 km, rather than driving distances or distances between postal boundaries. January and July climate values come from each area’s own matched NASA grid. Two areas can share the same grid and the same averages.
Climate context is not a planting deadline
Monthly mean air temperature and average daily precipitation come from the NASA POWER 2001–2020 climatology, using the nearest available MERRA-2 grid point to each postal area’s representative coordinate. The native grid is 0.5° latitude by 0.625° longitude. Nearby postal areas often share the same climate grid; this is regional context, not a measurement in your yard.
We acknowledge the NASA Langley Research Center POWER Project, funded through the NASA Earth Science Division Applied Science Program. Data were accessed on September 27, 2026 through POWER Climatology API v2.10.0. Read the NASA POWER data documentation.
Regional climate information describes historical conditions over a broad area. A monthly average cannot tell you the date of the last frost, tonight’s low temperature, your soil temperature, or the weather in a sheltered garden. Always check the source, measurement period and resolution shown with the data. We do not turn a hardiness zone or a monthly average into an exact sowing date.
Crop care is general guidance. Local growing pages keep the source and limitations beside the regional information. Choose your own reminder date after checking local conditions; calendar exports do not update automatically.