Zone Planting Schedule
Pick your USDA zone and get the whole year in one table: when to start each crop indoors, when to set it out, when to sow it straight in the ground, and when to expect to harvest it.
Choose your zone
Zones 3a through 11b. Not sure which one you are in? Find your zone from your ZIP code first.
How a zone schedule is built, and what it cannot know
A USDA zone is a winter survival rating built from the average coldest night of the year. It is not a calendar, and on its own it cannot tell you when to plant. Seattle and Dallas share a zone and their last frost dates are weeks apart.
So this page does the join for you. For each zone we take the median last spring frost and first fall frost of every ZIP area in our table that sits in that zone, then count the crop windows off those two dates:
start indoors = last frost - (weeks before last frost)
transplant or direct sow = last frost + (weeks after last frost)
harvest = planting out + days to maturity
Because the zone dates come from the same table as our ZIP lookups, a zone page and a ZIP page can never contradict each other. Each result below tells you how many ZIP areas its median was taken from, and says plainly when a figure had to be extrapolated instead.
The honest limitation: a single zone spans an enormous range of climates. Zone 8b covers both Charleston and Seattle. If you know your own ZIP code, the frost date lookup and the planting calendar will always beat a zone-wide median.
Jump to another zone
Every zone has its own address, so you can bookmark or share the one you garden in.
Keep planning
All of these read the same frost date table, so nothing here contradicts anything there.
Common questions
Can I really plant by zone alone?
Only roughly. A zone is a winter hardiness rating, not a calendar, and one zone can cover climates weeks apart in spring. Zone 8b includes both Charleston and Seattle. A zone schedule is the right tool when you are planning in general or shopping for seed. For the actual week you put plants in the ground, use your own frost dates.
Where do the frost dates for each zone come from?
They are the median of every ZIP area in our own table that carries that zone. We do not keep a second, separate zone dataset, because that is exactly how two pages on the same site end up disagreeing. Each schedule tells you how many ZIP areas its median came from.
Why do zones 3a and 11a say "extrapolated"?
Because almost no US ZIP area sits in them. Rather than print a confident number built on one or two records, we extrapolate from the nearest zones that do have enough data and label the result as an estimate. An honest estimate beats a precise-looking guess.
What does the risk setting change?
It shifts the frost dates and therefore every date in the schedule. At the 50% setting frost arrives after your last frost date in about one year in two. At the 10% setting the date moves roughly two weeks later, frost beats you only about one year in ten, and your season shrinks by about a month in total. The tool shows you exactly what the trade costs in days.
Why is my harvest window so wide?
Because days to maturity varies enormously between varieties of the same crop. A cabbage can be a 60-day variety or a 100-day variety. The window shown covers that whole range, and the number on the back of your own seed packet is always better than the number in any table.
Do warmer zones just get a longer version of the same schedule?
No, the shape changes. From zone 9 south, cool-season crops move out of spring entirely and into fall and winter, because sowing lettuce or spinach into a southern spring only gets you bolted plants. In zone 10 and warmer there is no frost date at all and the calendar is driven by heat instead.
Can I use this outside the United States?
The crop timings, yes, because they are counted off your own last frost rather than off a date in a US calendar. The zone frost dates, no, since they are medians of US ZIP areas. If you know your local last and first frost dates, the week offsets in the table will work anywhere.