One thing I learned from our brief time living in southern California is to push the limits of what’s supposed to work particularly stretching the warm and cool season planting dates. Much of gardening successes and failures depend on the weather which is really not that predictable. Sure we should look at forecasts and historical data but why not push the limits a bit? Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.
Here are a few different resources that I use for planting dates in Las Vegas. Some are searchable to show dates for other parts of the country.
The Southern NV Master Gardener program has a booklet called “Becoming a Desert Gardener”. The back page has a planting calendar. Becoming a Desert Gardener
Bob Morris from xtremehorticulture posted a planting calendar based on elevation. Bob Morris Planting Calendar
Here is a planting calendar from The Old Farmer’s Almanac. You can enter your city and state or zip code to get the chart for your area. Almanac Planting Calendar
Frost dates are another bit of handy information to have. According to The Old Farmer’s Almanac, our last spring frost is February 16. Our first fall frost is November 27. Both of these are listed as 50% probability.
Almanac’s Las Vegas Frost Dates
National Climatic Data is another source for finding your frost dates. This one has a lot more information. National Climatic Data
Most local people I know start planting mid-September. A lot of our warm season plants take a break during the high heat of our summers and start producing again when the temperatures start to drop. It’s hard to take out those rejuvenated tomato plants to put in cool season crops. The local nurseries start selling their transplants around mid-September so if you want to plant earlier you have to start your own seeds. Most of the above calendars have early August listed as the start of our cool season planting. We just now went below triple digits…towards the end of August. Hopefully we won’t heat up too much again. We just built some raised beds at our new house. Since they’re empty, we started planting this past weekend.
Happy Gardening!
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