Soil Temp, Key Factor on When It's Time to Plant

My friends at Garden Supply have a neat article called When is it Warm Enough to Plant?

It’s a neat approach to knowing what to plant in your garden without having to study each and every seed packet that you buy and looking up Gardening Zones, etc.  While a zone is great for a broad range rule of thumb, this article will explain and chart the optimal temperature for planting as well as the temperature for germination! Another reason why Garden Zones are not fool proof is that they have recently changed. Whether you attribute those climate changes to our global warming or not, the fact remains that the zones were updated in 2006. If you want to know more about hardiness zones, click here.

That means that if you plant carrot seeds at a soil temperature of 50 degrees F and it takes several weeks for them to come up, fret no more! It’s possible that the soil has not yet reached it’s optimal germination temperature.  This could help with the hit or miss guessing in the garden on whether your seeds are going to germinate.

An impatient gardener will be less tempted to plant seed on top of the slow to germinate seeds already planted.  It will also help the procrastinator gardeners who might wait a little too long to start on garden work. You’d hate to set out seed and it not germinate because the soil temp is too high.

I, for one, have done this before! How about you?

Happy Washing!

~Regina