Planting Calendar
Choose your state and a crop to get indoor start, sow/transplant, and harvest dates plus a printable month-by-month grid.
In California (typical zone 5–11), last frost ≈ Feb 15, first frost ≈ Dec 1 (289-day season), your Tomato plan:
Month-by-month (California, 2026)
| Month | Action |
|---|---|
| Jan | Start indoors |
| Feb | — |
| Mar | Sow · Transplant |
| Apr | — |
| May | Harvest |
| Jun | — |
| Jul | — |
| Aug | — |
| Sep | — |
| Oct | — |
| Nov | — |
| Dec | — |
Start indoors 6 weeks before last frost; transplant after soil warms. Zones 3–13 suitable. Dates are typical; confirm with your county extension and watch the 10-day forecast.
What the inputs mean
Pick your state first, because the whole calendar is anchored on that state’s typical last spring freeze and first fall freeze rather than on the calendar year. Then pick a crop. The tool reads the crop’s days-to-harvest and its temperature class — cool-season crops go in earlier and tolerate frost, warm-season crops wait for soil to warm — and places the dates accordingly.
How to act on the answer
Use the indoor start date as the hard constraint, not the sow date. A crop that needs six weeks indoors before transplant has to be started on the date shown or the transplant date slips with it. Where the tool shows a window rather than a single day, treat the early end as the risky end and the late end as the safe end, and read the printable grid as a checklist for the month rather than a promise about the weather.
What this tool cannot know
The dates are anchored on typical 30-year frost normals for the state, so they carry the same uncertainty as any climate normal: roughly half of years have a later frost than the average. It cannot know your microclimate, so a frost pocket or a lake-effect shoreline will run later than the state figure and an urban heat island will run earlier.
Where it fits in the season
A calculator is only as good as the location data behind it, so two other pages usually belong in the same session. The ZIP lookup establishes your zone and typical frost dates, which is the baseline that planting calendar is reasoning from, and the monthly zone checklists turn the same baseline into an ordered set of jobs for the current month. If you are working from a specific planting plan rather than a blank bed, the garden plan templates carry published spacing and crop lists you can feed straight into the planner.
Everything on this page runs in your browser from data shipped with the site. There is no account, nothing is uploaded, and the numbers you type are not stored on a server — which also means a printed sheet or a screenshot is the only copy you will have if you close the page. See all garden tools →
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