Zone 8 Planting Calendar

What to do

Spring crops still go in by the same four hardiness waves as colder zones, timed in weeks off your last frost rather than a fixed date. The table works the weeks out at both ends of zone 8’s range, and it gives you a date rather than a method: check each crop’s own growing guide for whether it goes into the bed as seed or as a transplant.

Wave	Weeks vs. last frost	Early window (~Feb 20 last frost)	Late window (~Apr 15 last frost)	Crops
Hardy	2–4 weeks before	Jan 23 – Feb 6	Mar 18 – Apr 1	broccoli, cabbage, kale, kohlrabi, onions, lettuce, peas, radishes, spinach, turnips
Semi-hardy	0–2 weeks before	Feb 6–20	Apr 1–15	beets, carrots, cauliflower, parsley, parsnips, potatoes, Swiss chard
Tender	at last frost	Feb 20	Apr 15	bush beans and trellised pole beans, celery, corn, cucumbers, New Zealand spinach, summer squash
Very tender	2+ weeks after	from Mar 6	from Apr 29	lima beans, cantaloupe, eggplant, okra, peppers, pumpkin, sweet potatoes, tomatillos, winter squash, tomatoes, watermelon

Garlic doesn’t fit that table or the fall count-back below. Softneck cloves go in November through early December and come out in April or May.

At daytime temperatures as low as 40°F, hardy crops keep growing, while very tender crops need above 60°F and do best between 70°F and 95°F. Soil temperature is the better check than any date on the table: measure at 8 a.m., 4 inches deep. The crop-by-crop numbers below are floors — below them, seed will not come up at all.

• Lettuce: 35°F
• Tomato, corn: 50°F
• Watermelon, beans, okra: 60°F

Read them as a warning that a sowing is too early, not as a sowing date: give the ground more warmth than the bare minimum before you sow.

Arbor takes your zip code at setup, resolves your zone, pulls that zone’s average frost dates for both ends of the season, then counts each crop’s own planting window from whichever one applies. Those per-crop offsets are finer than the four waves above: peas and spinach go in about six weeks before last frost, beets and carrots about four, and potatoes and parsley about two weeks after last frost rather than before it. Where the wave table and those per-crop dates differ, go with the per-crop ones.

Fall garden

Count back from your first fall frost instead of forward from your last spring one. Every date in the table above is a start, not a deadline: in the hot half of zone 8, heat ends the spring garden long before frost does. Lettuce and spinach often run into bolting (shooting up a flower stalk, which turns the leaves bitter) before they finish, which is why fall planting is the fix for a spring window that closes too fast.

The method is the spring wave table run backward: find your average first fall frost, then count each crop’s days to maturity back from it. That number — how long a crop takes from planting to harvest — is printed on the seed packet and carried in most of the growing guides here. Alabama’s fall garden generally goes in from August through September, shifted about two weeks earlier in the northern part of the state and two weeks later in the south. Texas counts the same window in weeks before the first freeze instead: snap bush beans 8–10 weeks before, tomatoes 12–14. Against a November 15 first frost, that’s beans in mid-September, tomatoes in mid-August.

In Western Washington, where winters stay mild and wet, gardeners harvest many vegetables right through fall and winter below 1,000 feet elevation. Frost rarely reaches the soil there, and a light mulch usually keeps it out. The trade-off is choosing early-maturing varieties and hitting real sowing cutoffs: bush beans by late July, broccoli direct-seeded by mid-July or transplanted by mid-August, and carrots by mid-July. If you plan to leave any bed empty over winter there, a cover crop of crimson clover, vetch, or annual rye with vetch is the usual fill-in.

Zone and season notes

Zone 8 promises one number and only one: an average annual low of 10 to 20°F. That is a winter-survival rating — it tells you whether a fig or an artichoke lives through to spring, and nothing about when your season starts. Texas maps that same rating across five gardening regions, which are USDA zones 6 through 9B: an average winter minimum of ‑10 to 0°F in the north, 25 to 30°F in the far south, and zone 8 the band in between.

The a/b half-zone split (8a versus 8b) does less work here than you would expect: averaged across each half, 8a’s last frost lands around March 13 and the warmer 8b’s about four weeks earlier, at the front edge of that late-February-to-mid-April window. Coastal exposure moves the date further than that. Glynn County on the Georgia coast sees its last frost around the end of February, while the South Carolina coast — one state north — averages April 1, and South Carolina’s own Piedmont runs two weeks later than that, to April 15. All of those dates are averages: extremes happen, and some crops take damage before the air reaches freezing.

In Georgia, the calendar is anchored on a belt running from Columbus through Macon to Augusta, and the dates adjust by region from there: spring planting runs two to three weeks earlier in the state’s southern tip and up to three weeks later in its northern mountains, with fall dates shifting the other way by up to two weeks.

If your spring harvest keeps getting cut short by heat, move more of your cool-season planting to the fall count-back rather than the spring wave table.