Garden
Extension guide →🌱This month
❄️Next frost date
🪵Ground · Our station
🌧️Rain · This month
Two dates run the whole garden year here. The last spring frost lands around March 20 and the first fall frost around November 15, and nearly every planting date in between is counted from one of them.
- 🥔February. Potatoes and English peas, as soon as the ground is workable.
- 🍅April. The big warm-season planting, once the frost date is behind you.
- 🌿May. Okra and southern peas, which sit and sulk until the soil is hot.
- 🥬August. The fall greens go in, and they cut all winter.
This is zone 7b running into 8a, on creek bottomland that drains unevenly. The month by month timing follows the Alabama Extension guide for Central Alabama, because a planting date with nothing behind it is somebody's opinion.
What to do now
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Cold air is heavier than warm air and runs downhill at night, so it pools in the low ground along the creek. That is why a bottomland garden can take a frost on a night the ridge above it escapes, even though the same bottoms hold moisture and warmth better through the day. Plant the tender things on the higher edge of the plot if you have the choice.
The planting year
—Dates and spacing
Spacing, sowing depth, and days to maturity for every vegetable grown in this state are published by the Alabama Cooperative Extension System and kept current. Rather than copy a table that goes stale, this page points at theirs.
Planting guide for home gardening in Alabama, and the month by month Alabama gardener's calendar.
Where this comes from Planting timing follows the Alabama Cooperative Extension System planting guide for Central Alabama. Frost dates are the ones this site already keeps in its season calendar, around March 20 and around November 15, and they are averages rather than deadlines. Ground condition and rain totals come from the FIVEMILE weather station. The packet photograph is somebody else's work, usually a United States Department of Agriculture picture in the public domain, and it is credited to the photographer who took it. A crop this site has no photograph of does not get a packet.