When to plant tomatoes in Texas

Texas is not one climate. It holds 8 USDA zones, and tomatoes go in the ground as early as 21 January – 4 February in zone 10a and as late as 4–18 May in zone 6b. Find your zone below.

In most of Texas the fall crop is the serious one. A spring tomato is shut down by June: above about 92°F by day and 75°F at night the pollen stops working and the plant flowers without setting fruit. Texas A&M devotes a whole publication to the fall garden for that reason. The dates below are worked out from each zone’s own frost records, and the fall ones follow AgriLife’s guidance of roughly eighteen weeks before the first frost — which is longer than the plant needs to ripen, deliberately, because several of those weeks are spent too hot to fruit.

Tomatoes in Texas, by zone. Plant-out windows, worked out from each zone’s own frost dates.
Zone	Last frost	Plant out (spring)	Plant out (fall)	Days ≥90°F
10a	14 January	21 January – 4 February	15 July – 15 August	139
9b	5 February	12–26 February	15 July – 15 August	113
9a	1 March	8–22 March	17–31 July	121
8b	15 March	22 March – 5 April	6–20 July	102
8a	29 March	5–19 April	27 June – 11 July	105
7b	5 April	12–26 April	22 June – 6 July	89
7a	18 April	25 April – 9 May	14–28 June	74
6b	27 April	4–18 May	9–23 June	74

Not sure which zone you are in? The app works it out from your postcode.

Where these dates come from

The frost dates for Texas are NOAA’s 1991–2020 US Climate Normals — the 50% probability of a 32°F freeze, taken per zone from the weather stations standing in each one. The fall window follows Texas A&M AgriLife EHT-056 Tables 1-3 (Region III = USDA 8). Everything else on this page is arithmetic on those two dates: the same inputs give the same answer every time.

Made only for gardeners in the United States

Your zone is one number about one winter night.

Every date above is worked out from Texas’s own frost records and its summer heat, read together — which is why two gardens in the same zone can be a month apart. ZoneSprout does that for 2,700 plants, in every zone of every state, and tells you what to do this week.

Get ZoneSprout How the dates are worked out