The UK Vegetable Growing Calendar: What to Sow Every Month
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Knowing what to sow in a UK vegetable garden is rarely about a single date on a calendar. It is about a window, and that window shifts depending on where the garden sits. A gardener in Cornwall can often get away with things a gardener in Aberdeenshire cannot try for another six weeks.
This calendar is built around that reality. It is a month by month reference for sowing, planting out and harvesting the vegetables most UK gardeners grow, with the regional flexing built in rather than bolted on. Each month links through to a full guide with variety recommendations, spacing, and troubleshooting, so treat this page as the map and the monthly posts as the detailed directions.
🗺️ How to Use This Calendar
Every entry below is given as a range, not a fixed date. Frost timing varies more within the UK than most calendars admit, so a range is the only honest way to present it.
For quick orientation, this calendar works from four broad UK zones: Southern England, the Midlands and East Anglia, Northern England and Wales, and Scotland. Southern England typically enjoys a frost-free growing season of 220 to 235 days. The Midlands averages closer to 185 days, and Northern England around 175. Scotland’s Highlands can see frost linger into late May or early June, while the Lowlands usually clear by early May.
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If a month says “sow indoors from,” gardeners in the south can often start at the earlier end of that window. Gardeners further north, or anyone on heavy clay or in a frost pocket, should lean towards the later end and watch the ground rather than the date.
Soil temperature is a more reliable signal than the calendar page, and it costs nothing to check. A simple soil thermometer pushed a few centimetres in first thing in the morning will tell you far more than a fixed date ever could. Most hardy vegetables germinate reliably once the soil holds steady at around 7C, and the tender summer crops want closer to 10 to 12C before they will make real progress. An old gardener’s trick works almost as well: if bare skin on the forearm finds the soil comfortable rather than cold, it is usually close enough to sow.
Successional sowing is the second habit worth building alongside this calendar. Rather than sowing a full row of lettuce, carrots, or beetroot in one go, sow a short row every two to three weeks through the main season. This keeps a steady, manageable harvest coming rather than a single glut followed by a gap. Quick growers like lettuce, radish, spring onion, and spinach are the easiest crops to run this way, and most stay useful for succession sowing from March through to August.
📋 Quick Reference: What to Sow, Plant and Harvest Each Month
| Month | Sow | Plant Out | Harvest | Full Guide |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| January | Broad beans (under cover), early peas | Little (prep beds, chit potatoes) | Leeks, winter brassicas, parsnips | What to Plant in January |
| February | Broad beans, early carrots (under cloche), onions from seed | Shallots (mild areas) | Leeks, parsnips, winter greens | What to Plant in February |
| March | Beetroot, carrots, peas, spinach, early potatoes | Onion sets, shallots, early potatoes (mild areas) | Purple sprouting broccoli, spring greens | March Garden Jobs UK |
| April | Beans (broad, French, runner under cover), sweetcorn (under cover), courgette (under cover) | Onion sets, early potatoes, brassica seedlings | Asparagus (established beds), spring greens, rhubarb | April Garden Jobs UK |
| May | Beans, courgette, squash, sweetcorn (direct, after last frost) | Tomatoes, courgette, squash, sweetcorn, tender crops | Broad beans, early salads, rhubarb | May Garden Jobs UK |
| June | Successional beetroot, carrots, salad leaves, dwarf beans | Maincrop leeks, brassicas for autumn, tender crops (northern gardens) | Broad beans, early potatoes, peas, salads | What to Plant in June |
| July | Successional salads, spring onions, quick turnips | Late brassica seedlings | Onions, garlic, courgette, French beans, early sweetcorn | July Garden Jobs UK |
| August | Spring cabbage, overwintering onions, oriental leaves | Spring cabbage seedlings | Tomatoes, sweetcorn, squash, maincrop potatoes | What to Plant in August |
| September | Overwintering onion sets, garlic (from late Sept in mild areas), winter salad | Spring cabbage, autumn onion sets | Pumpkins, squash, remaining beans and tomatoes | What to Plant in September |
| October | Broad beans (autumn sowing, mild areas), garlic | Garlic, spring cabbage (finish planting) | Maincrop potatoes, pumpkins, remaining root crops | What to Plant in October |
| November | Broad beans (mild/sheltered areas only) | Bare-root fruit, garlic (main window) | Leeks, parsnips, winter brassicas | What to Plant in November |
| December | Little (chit potatoes indoors for January) | Bare-root fruit (open weather only) | Leeks, parsnips, winter greens, forced rhubarb | December Garden Jobs UK |
This table is deliberately compact. For variety recommendations, exact spacing, and what can go wrong each month, the linked guide above covers it properly. Duplicating that detail here would just make this page slower to scan.
🌱 Spring: Getting the Main Season Started
Spring is when most of the year’s growing decisions get made, and it is also when regional timing matters most. A gardener in Southern England might have workable soil and a last frost behind them by mid-March, while a Scottish garden could still be waiting into May.
March through May carries the bulk of the year’s sowing: beans, peas, brassicas, roots, and the tender crops started under cover ahead of planting out. The general rule for anything frost-tender, courgette, squash, sweetcorn, French and runner beans, is to hold off direct sowing or planting out until the last frost has genuinely passed in your zone, not the date a national calendar suggests.
Hardy crops are more forgiving. Broad beans and parsnips can go in from late February in the south once the soil has warmed to around 7C, but a cold, wet spring can easily push that back by three or four weeks with no harm done to the eventual harvest.
☀️ Summer: Succession and Maintenance
By June, most of the main crops are in the ground, and the job shifts from sowing to keeping the harvest going. This is where succession sowing earns its keep: small, regular batches of beetroot, carrots, lettuce, radish, spring onion and chard sown every two to three weeks will carry a steady supply through to October, rather than one large flush that bolts or is harvested all at once.
July and August are also when the earlier plantings start to produce properly. Onions and garlic planted the previous autumn or in spring come out for curing, and courgette in particular needs picking every couple of days once it gets going or it will run away to marrow size.
🍂 Autumn: Overwintering and the Last Harvests
Autumn sowing is a smaller, more precise window. Overwintering onion sets and garlic want to go in from September into early winter depending on the crop, giving them enough root growth before the cold sets in without pushing top growth too far ahead of it.
This is also the season for lifting and storing maincrop potatoes, pumpkins, and squash before the first proper frost, and for getting spring cabbage and other hardy transplants into their final positions while the soil is still workable.
❄️ Winter: Planning, Prepping, and Patience
Winter looks quiet on paper, but it carries real jobs. Leeks, parsnips, and winter brassicas are harvested through the coldest months, often improved by a touch of frost. December and January are also the window for chitting seed potatoes indoors ahead of spring planting, and for planning next year’s beds while the ground itself is resting.
🏡 Greenhouse and Cold Frame Adjustments
Every date range above assumes open ground. A greenhouse, polytunnel, or cold frame changes the maths.
As a rough guide, an unheated greenhouse or polytunnel can bring sowing dates forward by two to four weeks compared with the open ground figures in the table, and a cold frame by one to two weeks. This is most useful at the two pinch points of the year: getting tender crops like tomatoes, courgette, and sweetcorn started earlier in spring under cover, and extending salad and winter greens later into autumn ahead of the first frosts.
The trade-off is ventilation and hardening off. Anything started under cover needs a proper hardening-off period, gradually increasing outdoor exposure over one to two weeks, before it goes into open ground. Skipping this step is one of the most common reasons an otherwise well-timed sowing checks or fails once planted out.
🧭 A Note on Regional Variation
None of the ranges above are guarantees. Local factors, an exposed hilltop, a sheltered south-facing wall, heavy clay versus free-draining soil, can shift timing by weeks in either direction even within the same postcode. The most reliable approach is to treat this calendar as the starting range, then adjust based on what the soil and the forecast are actually doing in a given year, rather than following it to the day.
This is also why planning a vegetable garden properly before the season starts pays off. A bit of groundwork on aspect, soil type, and rotation makes the monthly guides far easier to apply to a specific plot.
⚠️ A Few Timing Traps Worth Avoiding
A handful of mistakes come up again and again with UK vegetable timing, and most are easy to sidestep once you know to look for them.
Sowing tender crops too early is the most common one. A warm spell in April can tempt an early sowing of courgette or sweetcorn outdoors, but a late frost a fortnight later will undo weeks of growth in a single night. Waiting for the last frost in your own zone, not the national average, avoids this almost entirely.
Treating a single national sowing date as gospel is the second trap. A date that suits Kent will often be three or four weeks premature for the Scottish Borders, and a date pitched for Scotland will waste weeks of growing season further south. Working from the regional ranges above, rather than a single fixed day, closes that gap.
Skipping succession sowing is the third. A single large sowing of lettuce or radish gives one glut and then nothing, where the same seed sown in small batches every couple of weeks gives a steady, useful harvest for months.
Finally, forgetting to harden off anything raised under glass is a quiet but common cause of setbacks. Seedlings that move straight from a warm windowsill or greenhouse into open ground, wind, and cooler nights often check hard or fail outright, even when the timing was otherwise correct.
🌿 Building the Bigger Picture
This calendar sits alongside a few other guides worth reading together. Companion planting can help decide what goes next to what once the calendar tells you when. Anyone starting a vegetable garden from scratch will get more value from the monthly guides after working through the basics first, and the complete guide to growing your own vegetables is a useful companion reference for anything not covered month by month here.
For gardeners weighing up what to grow before deciding when, 48 types of vegetables to grow is a good starting point, and the spring vegetable planting guide goes deeper on the busiest stretch of the calendar. Over winter, cover crops for the vegetable garden are worth considering for any beds sitting empty, and the cool weather vegetables guide covers the shoulder seasons either side of the main summer push in more detail than fits in this table.
