Home garden vegetables can be planted in every season if you live in a warmer climate, or have protection from the elements such as a cold frame, greenhouse, or indoor seed-starting shelves. Carefully schedule your plantings relative to the average last and first frost dates in your area to optimize your vegetable growing in every season.
Create a Unique Schedule
A loose-leaf notebook makes a great tool for creating a vegetable planting schedule. Label one sheet of perforated notebook paper for each week of the year, and insert the papers in order in your notebook. Mark your first and last average frost dates on the appropriate pages (these can vary within a hardiness zone depending on your elevation, sun and wind exposure), then label each successive week in terms of its interval before or after last and first average frost dates.
Note on your schedule the seed-packet recommended start and transplant dates for each variety. Many vegetables, like carrots or radishes, can be planted in successive starts every two weeks to ensure ongoing harvest. Mark the earliest plant date for these in your notebook, then schedule additional start dates every two weeks until early autumn.
Note any adjustments to make for next year based on the present year's results. Copy over all the changes onto fresh sheets of paper in the dormant winter months, and you will have created a unique seasonal schedule to maximize production in your home vegetable garden.
Seed Packet Filing Guide
Create a physical season planting guide for your vegetables by storing seed packets in chronological order. Purchase inexpensive cardboard index card filing boxes from a stationery store, and label each by the planting season: winter, early spring, spring, summer, fall and late fall. Store in each box the seeds to be planted in that season, whether directly outdoors in the ground or for indoor seed-tray starting. For example, the early spring box would contain peas and spinach packets for outdoor planting, as well as tomato, pepper, and eggplant seeds for indoor seed tray starting.
Leaves, Roots and Fruits
The simplest seasonal planting guide for home vegetables is to remember the expression "Leaves, Roots and Fruits." Leaves grow quickly and have the lowest light requirements of the standard garden vegetables. Plant leafy greens like lettuce, spinach, cabbage and kale in early spring and late summer for spring and autumn growing in shorter, cooler days. Roots need lots of water, so vegetable crops which involve eating the plant roots--beets, turnips, radishes--fare best grown in the cooler, rainier days of spring and fall. Fruits come from flowers that bloom in the sun, and fruits can only come about after the plant's roots and leaves are fully grown. Thus vegetable plants in which the fruits are eaten--melons, tomatoes, peppers, eggplants--are harvested in late summer, and should be planted only after the ground is warm enough to hasten the plant development towards fruit production.
