How do I find my last frost date?

Ask people who garden locally — neighbors, community gardens, a nearby nursery — or consult your national or regional meteorological gardening resources. You want the average date of the last spring frost for your specific area. Note that gardens differ street by street: valleys and open plots frost later than city balconies and south-facing walls. When in doubt, assume a date one to two weeks later than the regional average.

What are the easiest seeds to start for a complete beginner?

Start with the forgiving ones: sunflowers, pumpkins, and peas (big seeds, fast and visible results), lettuce and radishes outdoors, basil on a warm windowsill, and tomatoes indoors in March. Lentil sprouts give results in days at any time of year. Save the patience-testers — lavender, parsley, chilis, and all tree seeds — for your second season.

Is it too late to start seeds in May or June?

Rarely. May is prime time for direct-sowing beans, sunflowers, pumpkins, and salads into warm soil, and quick crops can be sown right through June and beyond. What genuinely closes in late spring is the indoor-start window for slow crops like chilis and tomatoes — sown this late, they may not ripen before autumn. For everything fast, late sowing into warm soil often outperforms an early sowing into cold soil.

Can I start seeds indoors year-round?

For herbs, sprouts, and windowsill projects, yes — basil, lentil sprouts, and water-glass experiments like avocado ignore the calendar as long as they get warmth and light. For garden vegetables, indoor sowing only makes sense when a garden slot awaits the seedling; a tomato sown in October has nowhere to go. In the darkest months, anything beyond sprouts really needs a grow light to avoid legginess.

Why does my seed packet say something different from this calendar?

Trust the packet's relative logic and adapt the absolute dates. Packets are printed for broad regions and sometimes another country's climate entirely. The reliable information on them is depth, spacing, days to germination, and the weeks-before-frost figure; convert that last one using your own local last frost date. When packet and calendar disagree by a couple of weeks, the later date is the safer bet.

When should I sow fruit pits like apple, peach, or apricot?

Work with winter, not against it. Collect pits from autumn fruit, clean them, and give them cold stratification: 4–12 weeks (species-dependent) in barely moist paper towel or sand in the refrigerator, starting between October and January. They then go into pots in late winter or early spring, primed to sprout as temperatures rise. Sown fresh in autumn pots left outdoors, many achieve the same thing naturally.

What does succession sowing mean?

Sowing small amounts of a fast crop repeatedly — a short row of lettuce or radishes every two or three weeks from spring to late summer — instead of one big sowing. The result is a steady trickle of harvests rather than a glut followed by nothing. It suits small spaces perfectly: the next sowing simply goes into the gap the previous harvest just freed.

Seed Starting Calendar: What to Sow Month by Month 2026

Fresh herbs are where growing from seed makes the most immediate everyday sense: a small pot of basil on the windowsill replaces those sad plastic-wrapped bunches that wilt in the fridge within days, and it does so for the price of a pinch of seeds. No garden required — a bright kitchen window is a complete herb farm.

The three herbs in this category cover the essential kitchen trio and, conveniently, three different temperaments. Basil is the eager one: warmth-loving, fast to sprout, and generous all summer. Mint is the survivor: slow-ish from seed but nearly indestructible once going (so vigorous, in fact, that it should live in its own pot forever). Parsley is the patient one: famously slow to germinate — two to four weeks is normal, not failure — but then reliably productive for a year or more.

Each guide gives you the full route from seed packet to scissors: sowing depth and temperature, realistic germination windows, how to harvest so the plant regrows instead of giving up, and the common problems — leggy basil, sulking parsley — with their fixes.

Grow Kitchen Herbs from Seed

Frequently asked questions