Planting calendars where frost is rare
In much of Florida, coastal and southern California, the Arizona low desert, South Texas and Hawaii, a frost happens in fewer than half of years, so calendars counted from frost dates do not apply. Heat and rain set the seasons instead, and each region's Cooperative Extension service publishes its own planting calendar. These pages follow them.
- Arizona Low Desert
Arizona's Sonoran Desert valleys around Phoenix, Tucson and Yuma. Summers are extremely hot, with highs above 105°F for weeks. Winters are mild and sunny, with only a few light frosts in most years.
- California Low Desert (Coachella and Imperial Valleys)
The below-sea-level and near-sea-level desert basins of southeastern California, where summers are among the hottest in the country and winters are frost-light, sunny and dry. This is the state's winter vegetable belt.
- Central Florida
Central Florida has mild winters with only occasional frost, and long, hot summers with daily afternoon rains from June to September.
- Hawaii (low elevation)
Hawaii's lowlands are tropical, warm all year with only a few degrees between summer and winter, so frost is unknown below the high mountains. Elevation, trade-wind exposure and the wetter windward versus drier leeward sides of each island affect garden timing more than the calendar does.
- North Florida
North Florida and the Panhandle have a short but real winter with several frosts and freezes most years, and long, hot, wet summers. It is the coolest of the three UF/IFAS garden regions.
- Rio Grande Valley / South Texas
The Lower Rio Grande Valley at Texas's southern tip has a subtropical climate with long, very hot summers and mild winters where freezes are infrequent and brief. Gardeners there plant warm-season crops very early in spring and do most cool-season growing through fall and winter.
- San Francisco Bay Area & Northern California Coast
A mild Mediterranean climate shaped by the Pacific and the Bay: wet, cool winters with only occasional light frost, and dry summers that are foggy and cool on the ocean side and sunnier and warmer along the inner Bay shore.
- South Florida
South Florida is subtropical, with frost rare to absent, a warm, dry winter, and a hot rainy season from about June to October.
- Southern California Coast
The ocean-influenced coastal plain from Santa Barbara to the Mexican border, where marine air keeps winters frost-free or nearly so and summers mild, often with gray, cool mornings into early summer.
- Southern California Inland Valleys
The valleys behind the coastal hills - San Fernando, Santa Clarita, Simi, San Gabriel and Pomona valleys, the Inland Empire, inland San Diego County and SW Riverside County - where summers are hot and dry and clear winter nights bring occasional light frost.
- Upper Texas Gulf Coast
The Houston-Galveston coast is humid and subtropical, with long hot summers and short, mild winters; freezes come only some years, and later inland than on the coast. There are two main vegetable seasons, spring and fall, with cool-season crops growing through winter.