I recently finished putting together a vegetable planting calendar resource that I’m excited to return to year after year. Based a few trusted local resources, like the Portland Nursery Veggie Calendar, and my own 25+ years of experience homesteading in our climate, I distilled what to plant / how long things grow / and when to harvest into a simple spreadsheet.
This is a really helpful tool for me, and I think it will be for others as well. Seeing the year visually allows me to combine crops into the same raised bed. It also helps me plan for succession planting, like the lettuces that I will sow every 3-4 weeks for continued harvest. It helps me anticipate the winter crops going in mid-summer, and what needs to be harvested and removed to make space for those.
👉 View the veggie planting calendar spreadsheet (view-only in Google Sheets)
You can view-only in Google Sheets, make a copy, then adjust to add new rows for the crops you grow and shift things around to reflect the area you live. Each box is one week, so you might be able to plant things out sooner/later based on your local first/last frost dates.
Note: on the tomatoes, you will notice I have a comment that says “under cover”. I cover my beds with low tunnels using greenhouse plastic from October through June. That allows me to plant out tomatoes earlier than is typical for my area. I will likely plant other things on this list, like lettuces, sooner than shown on the spreadsheet if I plant them under cover.
Varieties really matter when it comes to the days to maturity. These are based on my go-to veggie varieties usually brought from Territorial Seed Company. I tend to favor open pollinated varieties over hybrids, but there is a big range here. As a compromise strategy in my garden, I will often plug in a few Early Girl tomatoes, so they ripen sooner than shown on this chart. Those will balance the heirlooms I love, which take a little longer to mature. Feel free to adjust the days to maturity as you make the spreadsheet your own!
I also have a few separate lines to distinguish between summer-season and winter-season crops. Things like broccoli or cabbage take longer to grow over the cold season, but the flavor is fantastic and worth the wait. Breaking out the summer vs winter crops helps me decide if it’s worth it to grow just one season, or try to plant them twice to harvest multiple times during the year.
Let me know if you found this veggie calendar helpful, or want to share some go-to resources of your own! It’s barely the new year, and I am already feeling behind on this year’s garden!