Turning point: When is it safe to plant your garden?
Spring in the vegetable or flower garden is a carefully orchestrated series of events. The goal is to keep things moving forward with the warming season, taking into account weather predictions and, because those are just predictions, average spring warming trends where you garden.
Many gardeners use Memorial Day as a turning point in their gardening calendar. But Memorial Day weather in San Diego is very different from Memorial Day weather in Concord, New Hampshire.
A turning point
A better measure is “the average date of the last killing frost in spring” where you live. Note that this is just what it says, an average. In any year, that date might be earlier or later.
You can figure out that average date of the last killing frost online at a variety of sites where you just type in your ZIP code. Or contact your local County Cooperative Extension office for that information.
Some like it hot
Vegetables and annual flowers can be grouped into the cold-tender and the cold-hardy. Cold-hardy vegetables include onions, lettuce, arugula, parsley, spinach, radish, carrot, parsnip, and cabbage and its kin, such as kale, collards, Brussels sprouts and broccoli. Snapdragon, pansy, petunia, pinks and verbena are some cold-hardy, annual flowers.
Corn, winter and summer squash, tomato, pepper, eggplant, okra, melon, cucumber and bean are some popular frost-tender vegetables. Marigold, zinnia, impatiens and heliotrope are frost-tender annuals that should not be planted too early.
Vegetables and flowers can also be grouped according to whether their seeds are sown directly in the ground or, for an earlier harvest, started indoors or in a greenhouse, to be moved into the garden eventually as transplants. Some vegetables are grown both ways,