What to plant in Central Texas, month by month

Fall is the better planting window in Central Texas. If you moved here from Ohio or Michigan, that sentence reads backwards. It is the single most useful thing to know about growing food here: autumn works like spring works up north, only longer, and the whole calendar below is built around it.

Spring here is a race. The starter pistol is the last frost, the finish line is the furnace in June, and one late freeze can eat two of your twelve good weeks. Fall has no cliff. Warm soil in September, cooling air in October, crops that sit in the ground getting better through a mild winter. Plant in September and the harvest runs into February.

Frost dates are ranges, not dates

Ask five sources for Central Texas frost dates and you get five answers. Roughly: the last spring frost lands somewhere between mid-February and mid-March, and the first fall frost lands somewhere between late October and early December. Averages hide that spread, and gardening by the average is a good way to buy your tomatoes twice.

The towns differ too. Austin runs warmest, partly on the strength of its heat island, with outlying yards half a step behind. Round Rock and Georgetown sit a little colder, and Georgetown can catch a freeze that skipped Austin entirely. College Station reads about the same on paper and still gets colder open-prairie nights than its zone number suggests. On the current USDA hardiness map, Austin sits mostly in zone 9a, Round Rock and Georgetown straddle the 8b and 9a line, and College Station reads 9a. A zone number is the average coldest night of winter. It says nothing about when frost arrives, which is the number you actually garden by.

Averages lie. In February 2021 a week of hard freeze killed shrubs that had shrugged off Austin winters for decades, and a killing frost in late March shows up every few years without much warning. Watch the ten-day forecast in spring, keep frost cloth folded in the garage, and treat every average as a coin with tails.

January and February: the quiet start

Winter here is a working season. Slow, but working. January is for bare-root fruit trees, berry bushes, and asparagus crowns while everything is dormant. Mid-February is potato planting, an old Texas tradition timed to Valentine’s Day, and onion slips, which should always be short-day types like 1015Y or Grano. Long-day onions bred for northern latitudes never bulb here, because our summer days are too short to trigger bulbing, so you get scallions forever.

Direct sow through February: carrots, beets, turnips, radishes, lettuce, spinach, kale, chard, and English peas if they go in early. Broccoli and cauliflower transplants can go in late January or early February if you can find them at a nursery. All of it grows slowly through the cool months, then surges in March.

March: the big gamble

Mid-March is tomato transplant weather, after the worst of the frost risk has passed. Peppers and eggplant want warmer soil, so give them until late March or early April. From mid to late March you can direct sow green beans, sweet corn, cucumbers, and summer squash. March is the month that tempts everyone into planting too early. A tomato in the ground on March 1 that catches a freeze on March 20 is a tomato you buy twice. Wait. Harden off. Plant, and keep the frost cloth close.

April through June: heat crops

April and May belong to the plants that like it hot. Okra from seed once soil is warm, late April into May. Sweet potato slips in May. Southern peas, melons, watermelons, luffa, and Malabar spinach, the one summer green that genuinely does not care about August. Succession-sow bush beans every two or three weeks through April, then stop. June bean seedlings fry.

June holds a specific disappointment for tomato growers. Once nights stay in the mid-70s and days push toward 100, tomato pollen stops being viable and flowers drop without setting fruit. The plant is healthy. The pollen is not. Cherry tomatoes keep setting a little longer than the big slicers, but by July even they slow down. That is a mechanism, not a disease, and no fertilizer changes it.

July and August: mostly, do not plant

Said plainly: sowing new seed in July and the first half of August is a waste of seed, water, and optimism. The exceptions fit on one hand. Fall tomato transplants go in during the last week of July and the first half of August, small plants in afternoon shade with water waiting. Okra already established keeps producing if you water it. Sweet potatoes keep filling tubers until the vines fade. Everything else either fails to germinate, germinates and cooks, or germinates, cooks, and invites spider mites to the funeral.

Let the beds rest instead. A bed sitting under chips in August is not a failure, it is a plan. Water the soil life enough to keep it alive, keep the compost going, and start fall brassica seeds in flats somewhere with afternoon shade.

August and September: the real new year

Late August into September is the best window of the year and the one newcomers miss. Soil is warm, so seed germinates in days instead of weeks. Days are shortening. Rain usually returns in September. Every crop that hates spring heat comes into its own: broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, kale, collards, and Brussels sprouts as transplants from late August through September; lettuce, arugula, mustard greens, carrots, beets, turnips, radishes, cilantro, dill, and chard direct sown from early September onward. Snap peas go in late September into October.

Succession is the whole game in fall. Sow a short row of lettuce and radishes every two weeks from early September through early November. One sowing gives you a feast and then a gap. Five sowings give you salad until spring.

One honest caveat: fall has its own pests. Fall armyworms and cabbage loopers often hit brassicas harder in autumn than in spring, so check leaf undersides weekly and pick early. And a spring broccoli is racing the May furnace, which it usually loses. A fall broccoli matures into weather it likes, then holds in the garden for months, a living fridge you walk out to in January.

October and November: garlic, strawberries, cover

Garlic goes in mid-October through mid-November, biggest cloves, pointy end up, and it mulches itself through winter happily. October is also strawberry planting month in Texas, along with shallots and multiplier onions. Sow spinach late, because it germinates poorly in warm soil; late October seedings often overwinter and produce in February. Fava beans and Austrian winter peas are worth a row if you like eating them.

Any bed going unused should grow a cover crop instead of weeds: oats, cereal rye, hairy vetch, or crimson clover. Roots hold the soil through winter rain, tops get cut in spring, and the covered bed is in better shape in March than the bare one beside it.

December: a desk month

Order seeds. Sharpen tools. Spread the last mulch. Water during warm dry spells, because winter drought is real and garlic and evergreens notice. If you did not plant garlic, that window is closed until next October; let it go. Onion slips arrive in January.

What actually overwinters

Garlic, onions, kale, collards, carrots, spinach, chard in mild winters, fava beans, and strawberries, mostly without protection. Cold nights concentrate sugars in roots and leaves, which is why a January carrot tastes better than an October one and why frost sweetens kale. Growth slows in the coldest weeks. It rarely stops.

Pick varieties for heat, not for the catalog photo

Varieties bred for cool climates bolt here. A Michigan-bred spinach sees three weeks of March sun and sends up a flower stalk in protest. Look for heat-tolerant types instead: Jericho romaine, Buttercrunch, and oak leaf lettuces; Malabar and New Zealand spinach as summer greens; Solar Fire, Heatmaster, Tycoon, and Celebrity tomatoes plus Sun Gold cherries; Clemson Spineless okra; Beauregard and Centennial sweet potatoes; Purple Hull peas; Contender beans. Butternut squash shrugs off squash vine borers better than yellow crookneck, which the borers treat as a buffet. Aggie Horticulture publishes Texas variety trials and the Texas Superstar picks, and those were trialed in this heat rather than in Michigan.

When to rest a bed

July and August. That is the answer. Mulch it thick, water it lightly, and come back in September to the easiest growing of the year. Two beds you keep beat ten you abandon, and resting two beds through August is how you keep them. The soil side of this, building no-till beds on clay and caliche, is its own article on this site. The calendar is the other half. Get the window right and this climate hands you two harvest seasons where most states get one.