What to Plant in March (Cold, Mild, and Warm Climates)

Foreign. Of the trickiest months for gardeners. Too late for some crops, too early for others. But if you get it right, you can set yourself up for an incredible growing season. So whether you've got lingering cold this month, or the perfect mild weather, or an early taste of warmth, I've got you covered in this video I'm going to share with you five perfect plants for cool, warm and mild climates so you know exactly what to plant right now. Stick around to the end and I'll give you a bonus tip that's going to give you four extra weeks of harvest this season. Let's dig in. First, let's cover the warm climate. Your last frost date has long been gone. You've got tomatoes, peppers, eggplants already in the garden, but you can keep planting. These are the things I use to fill in the blanks in my warm climate garden during this time. First off, you want to put some arugula. This is a perfect plant to put as an understory underneath your tomatoes, your peppers, those large towering plants. You're going to have a lot of soil space underneath those plants and arugula is the perfect filler. Arugula, when grown in the shade, can withstand the hotter temperatures and it gives you the chance to have a just cut salad even when it's hot outside. If you've got room on your trellises or any of your stakes or supports, you should add some more cucumber seeds. Cucumbers can be replanted throughout the season. They only need about six 60 days to get to harvest, so it's not too late to add more cucumbers. Any place you've got a little bit of extra space. Beans. Ah, the magical fruit. They fill up all the empty spaces in your garden in the warm season. I've got pole beans and bush beans here and I would absolutely add both to the garden space. Just like cucumbers, these are great blank space fillers and they get to harvest within about 660 days. Beans are a great way to get your protein from the garden and they are wonderful for your garden soil health. Next up, if you haven't planted these yet, your larger gourds, especially something fun like a pumpkin, those plants or seeds need to go into garden stat. So any space that you have on the edges of your beds or in places where there's a lot of soil that's open, it's a great place to add some gourd seeds or some gourd plants. These are going to be in the garden throughout the entirety of the summer. You're going to need to water and take care of them when it gets really hot and you'll harvest them around August or September. These plants need the most amount of time in the garden, so the time to plant them is right now. Finally, if you haven't added any yet, it's a great time to plant some nasturtium. Nasturtium is one of the best flowers to add to your warm climate garden. Nasturtiums love to trail over the edges of your beds. You can even grow them over a trellis. And nasturtiums also can be planted by seed directly in the garden. So that's why I included them in this list. You're not too late to get these going. All you gotta do, grab some seeds, stick them in the corners of your bed and you're going to have overflowing flowers in about two months time. Now, before I tell you about the next season, let's just be real. Do you love me telling you exactly what to do in the garden every single month? Well, if you like this, you're going to love this book. My brand new book, the Five Minute Gardener, I love. I don't just tell you what to do every month, I tell you what to do every single day. So the open of this book helps you line up your seasons and identify yourself as a mild or a warm or a cool season gardener. And then I teach you and show you what to do every single season, every single month, every single week, every single day of the year. So if you would love to just open up the page and go, oh, today I need to take care of my spinach, then this is the book for you. I'll put a link to my brand new book, the Five Minute Gardener right below this video. My cool climate friends, I am so happy to tell you that it is eventually going to get warmer and these seeds, they're going to give you hope this month, even on the days when it snows outside. When I lived in Chicago, these were the seeds I planted in March and I had the biggest, most overflowing garden in April and May. All my neighbors were so jealous because my garden was in the front yard. The first is spinach. Spinach is one of the first things I plant in in a cold climate garden. It goes into the soil as soon as the first few inches of the soil are workable. And even if it snows on that soil, even if there's frost and ice on that soil, as soon as that snow melts, as soon as that ice thaws, these spinach seeds Start to germinate and start to grow. Spinach is a slow seed to get started, but once it takes off, it is the perfect green for even the coldest climates. Next up, after your spinach, you want to put some pea seeds in. So pea seeds are going to go right underneath your trellis, and these are going to give you protein and flowers and beauty in the very earliest parts of the spring growing season. So these go into your garden. As soon as the soil is workable, the peas again will take in that snow melt. They can handle a little bit of ice and cold. And as soon as the soil warms up to about 50, 55 degrees temperature, these peas are going to take off. But they've had all that nice time to settle in the soil, so to grow to their fullest potential all throughout the spring, while spinach and other greens and your peas are growing outside in the soil, you want to be starting some seeds indoors right now so you're ready for when all the frost is over, around May or June. So this month is the time to start tomatoes and peppers and other frost intolerant plants indoors. The first you want to focus on is tomatoes. I find it so hard to find tomatoes I really like at a local nursery or greenhouse. But growing your own from seed truly pays off because you only need to grow three, four, maybe six plants to get a ton of harvest. So this is your month to start your tomatoes. They need to be under lights. You might even need a little heat mat, but probably you can just make it with some lights on top. Where you do need a heat mat is for your pepper plants. Pepper plants take longer to grow from seed, so you want to start these right away this month, and then they'll be ready to move out to the garden by the middle to the end of May. These are going to need a heat mat this month because they need to be at a really nice warm temperature to start to believe that it's worth growing. They want to know that it feels like summer outside, even though it definitely doesn't. Last but not least, you could start to grow some squash or zucchini indoors. You're going to have a huge plant by May. You don't want to start this really until about the end of March. These are a lot quicker to grow from seed. You could put a heat mat underneath these as well. But if you start these by the end of March, by the middle or so of May, you're going to have these huge, very healthy plants that are ready to go into the garden and start giving you fruit as early as the middle of June. As a cold climate gardener, we need all the hope that we can get to make it through this last push of cold weather. And planting all these seeds are definitely going to help you do just that. Planting the gardenary way works when your garden is set up the gardenary way. And I created a workshop that shows you exactly how I do it, how I've done it for hundreds of clients, and how thousands of gardenary gardeners are growing the same way I do with the soil, the setup, all of it. If you want to watch that workshop, I'm going to put a link to it right below this video. You can check it out right after you finish finding out what seeds you're supposed to plant next. If you're in a mild climate, you are going to love March. Oh, my goodness, so much is happening in the mild climate in March. You've got your garden completely packed with all kinds of greens and root crops and peas, and then you've got your tomatoes and peppers. Growing indoors, this is the way to make the most of this month. Things you can put in the outside garden so that it's even fuller and more beautiful and a little thing you could start indoors to make your summer garden even more impressive. So, first off, we're going to continue to plant spinach and any other leafy green. This is a great time to put this into the garden. If you haven't yet. Any place that you've got some blank spaces, you want to come in and add a little bit of spinach lettuce seeds so that you can get the most greens possible during this season. Spinach is a grain that stores really well in the freezer, unlike a lot of other greens that really wilt or turn bad if you don't eat them right away. Spinach is one of those that you can either turn into a greens powder or you can put in the freezer. So you could have your own spinach supply literally year round if you keep planting it this month. Next up is lettuce. So alongside your spinach, all those little blank spaces in your garden, they should be filled with some lettuce, same thing as the spinach. This is going to maximize your harvest, but also you just want to make the most and get as many lettuce harvests as you can before the temps get into those high 80s when these lettuces turn bitter. So don't stop planting this lettuce until it gets too hot to do so. Another thing to keep planting are radishes. So radishes are going to come and be ready to harvest in about 45 days. So if you plant them now, the same ones you planted last month in the garden, you'll get double the harvest before it gets too hot. Same with beets. If you didn't plant beets last month, you've got to plant them. This one beets are going to take about 75 to 90 days to get to harvest. You want to get these into the garden and establish before the weather starts to warm and get hot. These are also a great space filler. So if you've got your peas growing, if you've got lots of greens, if you've got cabbages, broccolis in between those plants, you can always stick some more beet seeds. And as you pull off those leaves as prune your plants, it'll give plenty of sunshine for those beets so that you can have the healthiest beetroot harvest possible. In the middle of the summer, that's what you're going to be planting outside, but inside I want you to keep planting flowers. So this is a great month to start some flower seeds indoors, particularly zinnias. If you have dreams of having your own cut flower garden, but you have no idea where to start and it sounds a little intimidating, zinnias are a perfect place to get started. They're the easiest cut flower and. And if you start them indoors this month, they're going to be ready to move out in about four to six weeks, which is the ideal time for a mild climate gardener. Now, if you want to get even more harvest from your garden, you've got to try this thing. And that's the second planting. So after you watch this video, you're going to head out to your garden and plant all these things, am I right? Well, about two weeks from now, when you're about in the middle of the month, I want you to plant these things again. This is called succession planting or a second planting. And most of these things you don't think about it. But if you plant all of the seeds all at once right now, you end up with this huge harvest all at once, and really not the time or the space or the people to enjoy it. Instead of planting all the seeds at once, if you plant half the seeds now and then about two weeks from now, you plant the other half of the seeds, you're going to end up with a much more extended harvest season and less waste from your garden. You'll be able to enjoy all these things about three to four more weeks into the season than if you just planted at one time, don't worry. I cover this in my book, Five Minute Gardener. Now, you know what seeds to plant this month. But where are you going to find all these seeds? Well, lucky for you, we just released our 2025 seed collection and depending on when you're watching this video, we may have some of these varieties left. So we'll put a link right below this video where you can check out all of our organic non GMO seeds. And the best part, each of these comes labeled the gardenary way. So every single set of seeds is labeled based on the season and the step. So you get to grow the gardenary way. You get to plant intensively just the way I do, just simply by following the seed packet instructions. So do me a favor and once you get these seeds at the link right below this video and you start growing them in your own garden, will you pretty please send a video or a photo of these plants growing in your space to helloardenary.com all year long we're going to be tracking and growing alongside together and I cannot wait to see that I'm growing all the exact same plants that you're growing in your garden too. So we'll put a link to that that email address right below this video too, so we can like grow the entirety of the year together. I cannot wait. And there you have it. This is the month for all of us to get out there and to plant some seeds. March officially kicks off what feels like the true season of gardening. And you cannot miss a day in the garden this month. So grab some seeds, grab a shovel and start growing. I'll see you out there. Thanks so much for watching. We are so excited to share this year of the Garden with you and I'll see you next time. Thanks so much for listening to the Grow youw Self podcast. You can keep listening anywhere. You love getting your podcast delivered on Apple podcasts, on Spotify, iHeartRadio, you name it, we are there for you. And if you wanna read the notes and get our free resources to help you grow more, you can go to gardenary.com podcast.