I agree it is hard to deduce practical things about gardening from books and websites. There are so many variables that they really CAN'T all be gathered into one or a few tables and "just looked up".
But we all want that and most websites realize that everyone wants a simple, clear answer to every question, even if the accurate answer would be "it depends on these six things that are hard to quantify".
Most such "sowing time tables" look at:
- the average first frost date for your location
- how many days to maturity each crop advertises
- how many days germination and grow big enough to TX out
- subtract DTM from AFFD and get a time to direct sow or TX out
- subtract (DTM plus GermnTime) from AFFD and get a time to start indoors.
If course, each of the first three rows is plus or minus several weeks, for year-to-year variation, variety-to-variety variation, climate variation within a Hardiness Zone, micro-climate variation, different styles off indoor seed germination ... I think if we dialed in a plus-minus range large enough to give 80% confidence in each source number, we would wind up with conclusions like : "the best time to start those seeds is some where between 3 weeks ago and two months from now".
Trial and error is guaranteed to work eventually, IF you keep better notes than I do!
You'll learn that
- warm weather crops need FEWER DTM in FL than the seed packet assumed
(or not - I never grew anything in FL!)
- Cool weather crops need to be started at the very LATEST edge of possible dates to beat the heat. (Or not, if you have a long cool fall.)
- If this is your first year staring seeds indoors, you might have been surprised to find that they did poorly for you and took 2-3 times as long as predicted to become big enough to plant out ... but you learned the opposite. Whatever you did, the seeds loved it and jumped right up out of the soil for you.
