De-Mystifying Plant Dates
How do the Bellair farmers know when it's time to plant? Well, at this point have a feel for it after doing it for many years, but more than that, we have a huge document that lists planting dates, fields, and spacing for all our crops! This is called the Crop Plan, and it's divided into a Field Schedule for planting in the field and a Greenhouse Schedule to make sure our seedlings are up to size in time to be planted! For a small garden, it can be overwhelming to think about when to plant. There are lots of online resources, and I suggest just using the one that makes the most sense to you. Here is a little info on how we think and categorize our crops for planting:
In general, our entire crop plan is planned around the frost dates. You can look up your frost dates on many different online sources (here and here), and the dates they give are variable. That's because our environment is variable and there are many microclimates and of course, each season is different, so it's all a guessing game! On Bellair, we know we are in a "cold sink" in the floodplain of the hardware river, so even though on most maps, including this otherwise very helpful VT publication, we show as "Zone 6B" or even "Zone 7," we are in fact more of Zone 6A. These zones are just different categories that sort areas by frost date! For Bellair, I consider March 30 to be the last likely freeze date, April 30 to be the last likely frost date and May 15 to be the last possible frost date. If you live in Charlottesville proper, I bet you can move the entire schedule 1-2 weeks earlier.
We can categorize plants that can take a hard freeze, ones that can take a light frost, and ones that can't take any frost! You can bolster any plant with protection of some sort (blankets, plastic, or other coverings) if you're the type that likes pushing the boundaries!
Hard Freeze -- Bellair plants these in late March/early April
kale, spinach, baby carrot tops (brief freeze), underground potatoes, most brassicas (brief freeze), perennial herbs
Light Frost -- Bellair plants these in April
all greens/brassicas (cabbages, broccoli, etc), small beet tops, small potato tops, fennel (with protection), lettuce (with protection), scallions, onions, cilantro, dill
Can't take the cold -- Bellair plants after May 15 or slightly before if long-range weather looks ok.
summer squash, peppers, eggplant, tomatoes, large potato plants, sweet potatoes, winter squash, basil, green beans
Bok Choy transplants were brought into the barn in the afternoon, because the nighttime temps are in the 20s, but we’ve run out of room in the greenhouse!
In general, we start itching to plant things right around now and we start watching the weather. If a cold snap is coming, we might hold off on planting til after that. Plants will do better just waiting than being planted out in freezing weather, where they will suffer "transplant shock" which will temporarily stunt growth or in extreme cases kill the plant. So for our bok choy, which was up to size in the greenhouse last week (March 21, 2022), we decided to hold off on planting until this week when nighttime temps are out of the 20's.
The same goes for summer stuff. No matter how many false springs Virginia throws at us, we're not fooled: we always wait until May 1 and look at the long-range forecast before setting out anything frost-tender. For us, the consequences of gambling with mother nature are just not worth it! All our schedules have very conservative planting dates, which ensure we do not let our CSA members down.
Again, if you're in Charlottesville proper, and you don't mind watching the weather and putting a blanket over your tomatoes during a cold snap, you can probably set them out up to 2 weeks earlier than us!