The Kitchen Garden Almanac
Nearly every planting guide is written for the whole country at once, which is another way of saying it is wrong nearly everywhere. Basil goes into the ground on a different week in Nashville than in Minneapolis.
Choose your hardiness zone below and the entire year is reckoned again — ten herbs, sowing to last cutting, from the frost dates outward.
The sowing chart
Choose your USDA hardiness zone
Sowing, setting out and cutting
What this chart is, honestly
A USDA hardiness zone records one thing only — how cold your winter gets. It does not encode frost dates, and two gardens in the same zone can sit a fortnight apart on the calendar because one is coastal and the other is not.
So every date above is the typical one for the zone, and your own ground will move it a week either way. That is honest, and it is still far more use than a guide written for everywhere at once. The printable goes further: it is reckoned from the recorded frost dates for your own postcode, not from the zone average.
A guide that hedges across every climate is a list of plant names, and you already know the plant names.
Frost dates are checkable facts, and getting one wrong costs somebody a tray of seedlings in April.
Thirteen zones is thirteen documents. The honest way to choose the order is to ask which are wanted.
The muster
The chart above is the zone average. The printable is reckoned from your own first and last frost, sized for the refrigerator door, and free. We are drawing them one zone at a time and starting with whichever is asked for most — so naming yours is a vote.
One message, once, when yours is finished. No list, no newsletter, no second letter.