Season timing

Can you fit a second crop before frost?

"Can I still plant that?" is a subtraction problem, not a calendar guess. You need the number of frost-free days between now and your first fall frost, and the number of days the crop needs. Most gardeners never write either one down — so here are the first numbers, straight from the frost data our planting calendar uses.

Your frost-free window, by zone

Estimated last spring and first fall frost dates for 1970, and the days in between. These are broad USDA zone averages — your own dates can move by weeks, so treat them as a starting point and check your local extension office or a ZIP lookup.

That spread is the whole argument for doing the subtraction: a zone 3 garden has about 122 frost-free days, a zone 10 garden about 318. The same "can I squeeze in one more crop?" question has completely different answers at each end.

How our calendar places each crop

The planting calendar doesn't store fixed dates. Each crop has windows in weeks relative to your last spring frost — negative means before it, positive means after. Your frost date slides the whole schedule to your garden.

These windows are typical extension guidance, not guarantees. They answer "when does this crop go in", which is only half of the second-crop question.

The half we won't invent for you

To finish the subtraction you need days-to-harvest for the crop you're considering. You'll find tables of those figures everywhere, usually as a single number — "55 days" — that quietly assumes ideal soil temperature, daylight and watering. We don't publish those numbers, because a planted bed doesn't read the packet.

What you can do instead is cheaper and more accurate: write down the date the bed actually emptied, and the date the next crop actually produced. Smart Garden Planner keeps both — plantings carry their own dates, the journal records what happened in the bed, and the harvest log tells you the first pick date for every planting. After one season you know how many days your own zone 6 bed took to bring in bush beans, and you can plan the next succession from your garden's record instead of a packet's promise.

The crops our timing table places furthest ahead of the last spring frost — spinach, peas, radish and lettuce — are the cold-tolerant group, and they're the same ones most gardeners lean on at the other end of the season. Check your own first fall date before you count on it.

Frost dates are zone averages shown as estimates. Local microclimates, elevation and weather swings move them by weeks.