SiLOSSiLOS

A planting calendar for five months of food

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1Succession is the whole trick

A single planting date gives a single harvest window; a Maryland extension calendar shows why staggering matters — arugula sown in spring (mid-March through May) harvests through July, and the same crop sown again in August through September harvests again in September through November. Same seed packet, two harvests, five months apart.

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2What goes in as seed, what goes in as a plant

Fast, simple crops — beans, beets, most greens — go straight into the ground as seed. Anything with a long seed-to-harvest time relative to your season — tomatoes, peppers, broccoli — gets started indoors and moved out as a transplant, or bought as a transplant, so the plant is already partway to harvest by the time it's in your dirt.

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3The first hour

Look up your own frost dates before buying a single seed packet — a Virginia county can span four hardiness zones with a full month's difference in planting dates between them. Everything else on this page is built on that one number.

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4What goes wrong

People plant a fall garden on the calendar date they remember from spring, not counted back from the actual first frost, and lose the crop to cold before it matures. The fix is arithmetic, not luck: days-to-maturity, plus a two-week buffer, counted backward from your zone's frost date.

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