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 28, 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 up to six nearby listed postal coordinates, excluding broad rural Canadian areas 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.
Rural Canadian FSAs, identified by a zero as the middle character, can cover widely separated communities. We do not use one coordinate to assign a climate table, daylight estimate or nearby-place distances to the whole FSA. Postal source labels are not verified lists of all communities. These areas remain available with regional advice and a route to official community climate stations.
Station normals come first where available
Our static location maps combine generalized state, province and coastline geography from Natural Earth with approximate GeoNames postal coordinates and the climate-station metadata described below. Maps are generated ahead of time and shared across crops; they do not request live tiles or your device location. The map scale is approximate, with north at the top. They show neither postal boundaries nor street-level detail. Wide rural Canadian FSAs use a province or territory overview without a single postal pin. Texas historical calendars use a state overview; their planting-region boundaries remain in Figure 1 of the original Extension source.
For other postal reference points, we match the nearest qualifying station within 50 km in the same country, using great-circle distance. United States monthly normals come from NOAA NCEI’s 1991–2020 release, version 1.0.1. We require all twelve monthly mean temperatures, standard or representative coverage flags (S or R), and at least ten contributing years per month. Provisional, estimated and missing temperature normals are excluded. NOAA normals may be adjusted and filled using neighboring records; they are not raw observations for every day.
Canadian monthly normals come from Environment and Climate Change Canada’s 1991–2020 composite data. Complete monthly temperature records with source coverage codes A–D are included. Composite metadata coordinates and elevation are averaged across listed component stations; composites spanning more than 10 km are excluded. Each page displays the source’s temperature and precipitation coverage codes separately. A thirty-year reference period does not mean every element has thirty complete years of observations.
Matched station distance is measured from an approximate postal reference point, not from your house. Estimated postal coordinates are labeled. Station elevation is shown, but the garden’s elevation is unknown. A close station may still differ in shelter, terrain or coastal exposure. We do not rate it as an exact garden climate match.
NOAA climate normals and methodology · Canadian climate normals and coverage methodology. Both station datasets were accessed September 28, 2026.
Climate context is not a planting deadline
NASA POWER 2001–2020 climatology remains a secondary comparison, or the fallback where no qualifying station is within 50 km. Its monthly mean air temperature and average daily precipitation use the nearest available MERRA-2 grid point to the postal reference coordinate. The native grid is 0.5° latitude by 0.625° longitude. It is regional context, not a measurement in your yard. Station precipitation tables show monthly totals in millimetres; NASA tables show mean daily precipitation in millimetres. These quantities must not be compared as though they have the same time unit.
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.
Regional sources and growing stages
Each state, province and territory has a regional advisory link. United States institutions are selected from the Extension Foundation state directory; Canadian referrals include provincial or territorial agriculture services, university gardening programs and local Master Gardener organizations. These referrals are not evidence that a postal-code planting calendar has been verified. Commercial, Montréal-specific or northern general resources state their narrower scope beside the link.
Indoor seed starting, direct sowing and outdoor transplanting are shown as separate operations. General growing-stage guidance does not transfer Minnesota dates to other regions. Texas table dates are preserved as historical references; where the original table does not distinguish sowing and transplanting stages, we say so rather than inventing separate dates. Spring and fall planning are separate decisions.