What to Plant This Week

Pick your state and a week to see exactly which crops to start indoors, sow, or transplant — printable.

In one sentence: What to Plant This Week is a week-by-week decision tool: it takes a state and a week and returns which crops to start indoors, which to sow directly, and which to transplant that week.
⏳ Garden countdownToday: Sep 25

USDA 2023 zones + NOAA 1991-2020 frost normals. Estimates — check your local forecast before planting.

In California (last frost ≈ Feb 15), during the week of Sep 25–Oct 2, there are no major seeding or transplant actions — focus on maintenance, harvesting, or planning.

Tip: warm crops are started indoors ~6 weeks before the last frost; cool crops are sown 2–4 weeks before. Adjust the week to your region's shoulder seasons.

Dates use typical California freeze dates (02/15 last frost). Confirm with your county extension and the 10-day forecast.

What the inputs mean

Choose the state to set the frost baseline, then choose the week. The tool compares the week against each crop’s frost offset and temperature class and sorts the crops into the three actions.

How to act on the answer

Treat the indoor-start list as the urgent one, because those dates cannot be shifted later without shifting the whole downstream schedule — a transplant date is fixed by the frost date, so a delayed start means a smaller plant going into the ground. The direct-sow list is more forgiving and can be split across two or three weeks, which is also the better strategy: a staggered sowing hedges against a bad week.

What this tool cannot know

The frost baseline is a state-level typical figure, so it cannot represent the range across a large or mountainous state, and it cannot see a forecast. Check a ten-day forecast before acting on a sow or transplant recommendation, and confirm the specific variety’s days-to-maturity from the seed packet rather than relying on the crop average.

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 what to plant this week 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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