The Sowing Calendar — Vegetable Garden Planner: Frost-Date Worksheets, Succession Tables for 24 Crops & Companion Charts (Printable PDF)

Most first gardens fail in the calendar, not the soil: everything is sown on one hopeful Saturday, everything matures on one overwhelming weekend, and then the bed sits empty for two months while the money spent on plants and compost produces a single glut nobody can eat. The Sowing Calendar is a 15-page printable PDF containing exactly this: a frost-date worksheet that shows you how to find your local last and first frost dates from NOAA / National Weather Service data and your cooperative extension service and then back-calculate every sowing date, a fully worked example for a Zone 8 garden and a Zone 6 garden side by side (Dallas, last frost about March 15, and Indianapolis, last frost about April 25, both labelled as examples to replace with your own dates), succession sowing tables for exactly 24 crops — count them: lettuce, bush beans, carrots, radishes, spinach, peas, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, zucchini, sweet corn, kale, chard, beets, scallions, cilantro, basil, winter squash, potatoes, broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, melons, and okra — each with its real days-to-maturity range and sowing interval, a companion planting chart split honestly into pairs with research support and famous pairs flagged as folklore, a seed-starting log, an indoor sowing calculator worksheet, and a harvest tally in pounds with an estimated dollar value and a full season garden ledger. You can check the core claim from this listing alone: the bean math is worked in numbers inside — bush beans sown on five dates three weeks apart (for example May 9 through August 1 in the Indianapolis example) at about 55 days to maturity produce for roughly eleven weeks instead of one glut week, and the lettuce interval printed in the table is every 10–14 days while carrots are listed at a realistic 60–80 days, not the packet's optimism. What this is: a dated planning system for home vegetable gardens that converts any gardener's own frost dates into a season of staggered sowings. What this isn't: a zone-by-zone planting calendar with pre-printed dates for your town (you fill in your own dates using the worksheet — that is what makes it accurate), a guarantee of any yield, or a source of companion-planting certainties — the folklore pairs are flagged as folklore on purpose; do not buy it if you want a chart that simply tells you what to plant on Saturday for one specific city. Twelve dollars for 15 pages covering 24 crops, two fully worked regional examples, and the logs and ledgers for a whole season — less than the cost of the seed packets it organises. Print-ready, fill in by hand or in any PDF editor — ideal for beginner and intermediate home vegetable gardeners, allotment holders, and anyone searching for a vegetable garden planner, succession sowing chart, frost date worksheet, seed starting log, companion planting chart, or printable garden journal.