East Texas Planting Guide 2022

What You Need to Know Before You Dig

East Texas is a bastard climate for gardening. Hot humid summers, heavy clay soils that crack when they dry, and rainfall that comes down in two days rather than spreading out. If you plant by a generic zone chart, you will lose half your crops to either root rot or heat stress before August hits. The East Texas Planting Guide 2022 exists because extension offices figured out that the standard Southeast planting calendars are off by about three weeks here, and they compiled local trial data from over a dozen county stations. The guide is a PDF document published by the Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service, specifically covering the upper Gulf Coast and Piney Woods regions. It breaks down planting windows by vegetable and fruit type, factoring in the region's late spring frosts and early fall chill fronts. You can find it through the AgriLife Extension publications page. Search for it directly if the portal search is slow. I have used the 2022 revision as my primary reference since it came out, and it replaced the 2019 version which had incorrect bloom dates for blueberries in Gregg County. It is organized around three core variables: last frost date, first frost date, and soil temperature thresholds. Most people ignore the soil temperature part and just plant on the calendar date. That is a mistake. Tomato transplants in Henderson County will not take until the soil hits 60°F, which usually means the second week of April, not March. The guide gives those thresholds explicitly. It also includes a section on cover crop termination timing, which most home gardeners skip but is essential if you are working with native clay.

I keep a printed copy in the shed. The digital version is fine but the paper copy survives hose watering and rain blown under the door.

What the Guide Gets Right and Where It Breaks

The vegetable transplant windows are solid. The sweet potato data is particularly useful since East Texas produces more sweet potatoes than almost any other state region except the coastal plains further west. The guide correctly notes that slips should go in after the soil has warmed consistently above 65°F, which here is typically the third week of May rather than the mid-May date you see in Georgia plantings. The biggest gap in the 2022 edition is the lack of specific guidance for micro-climate variation between the hardwood hillcountry pockets and the flat coastal prairie. If you are in a low depression site near the Angelina River, you are essentially in zone 8b while your neighbor three miles inland is firmly 8a. The guide treats the whole region uniformly. I learned this the hard way when I planted collards according to the listed spring window in 2023 and lost everything to a late frost that only hit my property because of the cold air drainage from the nearby timber ridge. I ended up shifting my spring collard planting back ten days from the guide's recommendation and started using a frost cloth on nights where the temperature dipped below 35°F regardless of the calendar. That workaround has kept my yields consistent ever since.

Soil Preparation Is Half the Battle

East Texas clay is not a suggestion, it is a command. The guide mentions incorporating organic matter but does not emphasize how much. I have found that a minimum of three inches of composted pine bark fines worked into the top six inches of soil makes the difference between a plant that survives and one that produces. Without that, you are basically farming red bricks. The clay holds water like a bucket until it decides to not hold water at all, and then your carrots split and your okra roots drown. The guide's soil test recommendations are accurate but conservative. Run your own test through the county extension office if you can. It costs nothing and tells you whether your pH is acidic enough for blueberries or whether you need lime for squash. Spring planting for warm season crops like peppers and eggplant should wait until May in most of East Texas. Early varieties of bush beans can go in mid-April. Pole beans follow two weeks later. Winter squash and pumpkins go in late April through mid-May depending on your exact location. For fall planting, the guide recommends starting broccoli and cabbage seedlings in late July for a September transplant, which sounds aggressive but works if you have shade cloth available for the first two weeks after transplanting. The humidity in August will cook unprotected brassica seedlings in six hours flat. Fruit trees and berries should be planted in late December through February while dormant. The guide's recommendation for peaches is specific to the low-chill varieties suited to this region, notably the 'Tropic Sweet' and 'Redking' cultivars. Standard Georgia peach varieties will not produce here because they do not accumulate enough chill hours during our mild winters. This is the kind of detail that saves you from spending $40 on a tree that looks healthy for two years and then produces nothing.

Common Mistakes People Make with This Guide

Reading the calendar dates without adjusting for your specific frost risk zone. East Texas has micro-frost pockets everywhere. If you are in an area with a history of hard freezes, add ten days to the guide's earliest planting date. Another mistake is ignoring the rainfall distribution. The guide assumes average precipitation, but some years the spring comes in dry and some years it arrives with weeks of saturation. Adjust your seed direct-sow dates accordingly. Dry springs mean you plant earlier because the soil warms faster. Wet springs mean you wait because seeding into cold wet clay produces rot before germination. The 2022 revision also assumes you are growing in ground beds rather than containers. If you are container gardening, the planting windows shift earlier because container soil heats up faster in spring but also dries out quicker in summer. Plan on watering twice daily in July if you are in pots.

Downloads and References

The East Texas Planting Guide 2022 is available as a free PDF through the AgriLife Extension Publications website. The direct publication number is E-638. There is also a companion fact sheet on pest management timelines for the region that pairs well with the planting guide, covering thrips pressure on peppers and fall armyworm onset in sweet corn. Both documents are useful if you read them before you buy seeds rather than after you have a problem. I have attached a note to my copy marking the pages where the data diverges from what I have observed on the ground in Anderson County. The guide is accurate but it is not infallible, and the best results come from using it as a starting point rather than a finished answer.