Building A Personalized Vegetable Garden Planting Calendar
Amen Gardens - Empowering Our Community
Our group is dedicated to empowering our community by providing gardening resources, education, and support to those in need. Here we offer an approach to managing the complexities of knowing when to plant the vegetables you want to grow.
Probably the best place to start is to list the vegetables you like the best, and always try one or two new varieties or veggies that you've never eaten, then depending on the amount of garden space you have prepared, select the crops that you have room for in the quantities you desire, but don't order seeds just yet, in the next step lets look at the "A Year In The Garden" annual publication of the Fayette County Record loaded with many gardening columns from Andy Behlen and recommended planting dates for our Climate Zone (based on earliest frost and latest freeze dates).
A Year In The Garden - by Andy Behlen
Around the first of the new year, watch for this publication in your subscription of the Fayette County Record. This printed publication does just about everything but plant the seeds and pull the weeds. Andy has done all the planning work to identify the best planting dates for gardeners in Fayette and surrounding counties. Be sure to have this printed calendar on your desk to make notes, and track your progress. The calendar also contains relevant gardening articles and advertisements from area merchants and gardening interests.
Using The Texas AgriLIFE Planting Guide
The Texas AgriLIFE Extension Service of Texas A&M has a wealth of gardening information; here, we want to focus on the Spring Planting Guide, and the Fall Planting Guide. First note the Texas Gardening Region Map (Fayette and surrounding Counties are in Texas Region III); this is a refinement of the USDA Plant Hardiness Zones ( Fayette and surrounding Counties are in USDA Zone 9a).
The Spring and Fall Planting Guides show a table of vegetables and the range of dates per region when a specific vegetable can be planted with a reasonable chance of successful germination and growth.
With this information you can now determine from your list of vegetables the appropriate time to plant each one. Once you have a list of vegetables and planting dates for each, you can make note to order seeds a few weeks before their planting date, and also work to have the planting area prepared.
Extending Your Growing Season
The Spring and Fall Planting Guides show dates for sowing seed in the garden; one exception you might note on the Spring chart it lists Tomato (transplant), Cauliflower (transplant), and Pepper (transplant). This notation means that the dates shown refer to transplanting Nursery grown plants rather than seed in the garden. Buying or growing your own plants indoors allows you to extend the growing season to better adapt to our climate. For example, if you waited until mid-March (after last frost date) to plant tomato seed in the garden, by the time the plants were mature enough to produce fruit, the temperatures could be high enough to stress the plants, reducing production.
If you do decide to grow your own transplants, adjust your indoor seed planting date about six to eight weeks earlier so that your transplant date matches the date on the chart.
Other Vegetables that transplant well allowing you to extend your growing season are Peppers, Broccoli, Cauliflower, Beets, Eggplant, and Celery.
Crop Rotation and Succession Planting To Increase Your Harvest
Did we mention that there would be some homework? Crop Rotation, and Succession Planting are two practices that you'll need to note on your Personalized Planting Calendar, so we'll introduce them here and let you explore the wealth of information available on these two topics on the internet, you know, when your not out cultivating, harvesting, planting, watering, fertilizing the garden.
Crop Rotation has many advantages to overall soil health and pest control, but the one we'll look at is its ability to increase the types of crops you can grow in a limited space. Say for example that you'd like to grow both Beets and Green Beans, but don't have enough garden space for both. The solution offered by crop rotation is to first plant the Beet crop and once harvested plant the Green Bean Crop in its place. Two crops from the same space in the same growing season. As you identify opportunities for applying this practice in your garden you'll want to update your Personalized Planting Calendar to reference in subsequent years.
Succession Planting is helpful if you want to extend the harvest of a crop throughout the growing season. Say for example you love Arugula (hardy throughout the heat of our Summers, and all but the coldest of our freezes) as a salad base and want an almost year-round supply. Plan for an Early Spring, Early Summer, and Early Fall Planting. After the first planting has gone to seed (and you've harvested the seed) reuse the space for the next scheduled planting.
Finishing Touches
Once you have your planting dates recorded in your Personalized Planting Calendar you may find it helpful to add additional reminders for ordering seeds and other annual tasks like fertilizing fruit trees, pruning fruit trees... there's a lot to keep track of, we hope this guide will help beginning gardeners simplify the year to year planning tasks. Happy Growing!
A Sample and Template can be Downloaded below:
