Help New Urban Food Gardeners know when to do what. Frost dates and other variables make gardening time sensitive. Each location has its own ground rules for when to start seeds, when to plant seedlings, how to harden off, preparing the soil, and even illegal plantings. We can create a data base of location-specific dates. It would be especially helpful to have dates rather than months, feet and inches rather than “close” or “far apart”, and clarity about indoor seed starting versus outdoor sowing.
Here are some examples:
National Zone-Based Planting Schedules
- OR http://www.2bseeds.com/plantingschedule.shtml
- OR http://www.thevegetablegarden.info/planting-schedules
- OR NEW this Radically Simple all-in-one chart, Clyde’s Garden Planner: http://cdmplanning.hypermart.net. You can also visit the slideshow for seeing how Radically Simple this planner is:
http://cdmplanning.hypermart.net/GardenPlannerSlides.pdf. GrowfoodatHome will issue an official review by May.
State Specific Gardening Calendars
- An impressive site that plots registered small gardens on a map. Register and then see a customized planting schedule. Visit the World Food Garden website at http://www.worldfoodgarden.org.
- A link to an Illinois food gardening calendar: http://urbanext.illinois.edu/gardencal/february.html
- A link to a Middle Georgia food gardening calendar: http://pubs.caes.uga.edu/caespubs/pubcd/L174.htm (consider Middle Georgia as a belt across the state from Columbus through Macon to Augusta)
- A link to a greater Kansas City metropolitan area gardening calendar: http://www.savvygardener.com/Features/veg_garden_calendar.html
- A link to Maricopa County’s (Arizona) gardening calendar: http://ag.arizona.edu/pubs//garden/az1005.pdf.
- A link to a food garden calendar for Austin, Texas: http://www.main.org/aog/plantcal.htm
- Al ink for Missouri: http://extension.missouri.edu/explorepdf/agguides/hort/g06201.pdf.
Variety-Based Planting Schedule for Zones 4 to 7
- A link to a site focused on flavorful varieties for USDA zones 4 to 7 (a bit general for our New Urban Food Gardeners, but a contributor could suggest how to adjust the dates for each zone (4, 5, 6, and 7) http://growingtaste.com/calendar.shtml
Frost-Date Based Planting Schedules
- A link to a customizable garden calendar where users can access their frost dates and have the site create a calendar based on those frost dates: http://www.gardenaction.co.uk/main/weather.asp (not all states or towns are in the database).
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