Well, I’m part way through my spring vegetable garden planning. I know what I am going to plant and I’ve prepared a garden layout based on my crop rotation schedule. The next step was to determine my planting schedule.

There is a lot of information out there on seed starting schedules. A nice one is The Lazy Gardener’s Automatic Seed Starting Chart. To start you enter your frost free date. While this guide gives a good suggestion on seed starting dates, it does not deal with succession planting, fall planting or give any indication of harvest time.  Another good source is the information on the back of the seed package.  Since I’m a bit of an organization nut, I decided to put all of this information together in a simple chart that I could refer to and update throughout the season.

Here is my seed-starting-schedule-2010. I’ve included recommended soil temperatures for good germination, days to maturity and a full season planting schedule for the vegetables I will be growing this year.  This schedule is based on my frost free date of May 9 in my zone 5 Ontario garden.

Next step, starting my seeds indoors!