Zone 7 Planting Calendar

What to do

Vegetables sown outdoors go in one of four waves, timed in weeks off your last-frost date rather than a fixed day on the calendar. The table works those weeks out at both ends of zone 7’s range — find the column closer to your own last-frost date and read down it.

Wave	Weeks vs. last frost	Early window (~Mar 26 last frost)	Late window (~Apr 25 last frost)	Crops
Hardy	2–4 weeks before	Feb 26 – Mar 12	Mar 28 – Apr 11	broccoli, cabbage, kale, onions, lettuce, peas, radish, spinach, turnips
Semi-hardy	0–2 weeks before	Mar 12–26	Apr 11–25	beets, carrots, potatoes, Swiss chard
Tender	at last frost	Mar 26	Apr 25	bush beans and trellised pole beans, corn, cucumbers, summer squash
Very tender	2+ weeks after	from Apr 9	from May 9	tomatoes, okra, peppers, sweet potatoes, tomatillos, watermelon, winter squash

Those are outdoor dates, sown in the bed or set out as transplants started indoors weeks earlier — trays generally want 6 to 8 weeks under lights before they’re ready to move out. The wave thresholds run from 40°F daytime for hardy crops up to above 60°F for very tender ones, which prefer 70–95°F. In this zone’s long false springs, a late-winter cold snap won’t set back a hardy crop, but a single week below 55°F can stunt a pepper with no frost involved — an early warm spell isn’t a green light on its own.

Soil temperature is the better check than any date. Measure at 8 a.m., 4 inches deep (6 inches for beans), and plant once the soil holds a crop’s minimum — 40°F for cool-season crops, 50°F for warm-season ones is the simple version; lettuce actually germinates down to 35°F, tomato and corn at 50°F, watermelon at 60°F. Vine crops such as squash and cucumbers resent root disturbance and do best direct-seeded; if you start them as transplants, get them in the ground within 2–3 weeks of seeding. For everything else headed indoors first, see how to start seeds indoors for the setup.

In a zone where last frost ranges over a month, the thermometer is the one check that reads the same everywhere in it. Arbor takes the other route: give it your zip code at setup and it resolves your zone and pulls that zone’s average frost dates, counts each crop’s planting week back from them, and adds the resulting tasks to your list when you confirm the plan.

Zone and season notes

The a/b line matters more than it looks — plan on roughly a ten-day shift in both directions for the half-zone split, spring and fall alike. Zone 7 is really several climates sharing one winter minimum: parts clear frost by late March while others don’t clear until late April, and spring planting can run one to three weeks later moving from the milder to the cooler end of the zone, with fall planting starting about two weeks earlier there in exchange.

In the southern half of the zone, summer heat closes the spring window before frost is ever the issue again. Warm-season crops there are typically cut off in mid-to-late July to finish before fall heat and frost both, with the last realistic sowings for beans and potatoes by mid-August and for cucumbers or squash by the end of August. Spring plantings are usually harvested well before those cutoffs, in June and July.

Fall in zone 7 isn’t a bonus round tacked onto spring. It’s a second season, and in the southern half of the zone it’s the more reliable one — in its mildest pockets, spinach can go in as late as November, and garlic planted through November isn’t ready until late the following spring. The timing is the spring subtraction run backward, with one addition: add about 18 days to a crop’s days to maturity for the harvest window itself, then count back from your first frost date for the sowing date. A fall broccoli, at 70–80 days, against an October 25 first frost has to be seeded by the second half of July. That rule governs frost-tender crops; hardy crops are the exception, since they tolerate frost and keep producing past the first-frost date, which is why a November spinach sowing still works — the count-back is a floor, not a deadline.