When it comes to USDA growing zones: a lower number means colder, shorter seasons. But a higher number means longer, warmer seasons. In Zones 8 and 9, growers have a much longer growing season and fewer days of freezing temperatures. Zone 8a and 8b spans from coastal Virginia through the southern central states of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Central Texas, and up through most of California.
Zone 8 is a warm growing zone in the United States and benefits from a long growing season. However, as our summers become hotter and seasons become less predictable, growers in these regions should take caution during the hottest parts of the summer.
Let’s get into how to start a vegetable garden in Zone 8.
Pick Your Plot
Choosing a sunny, well-drained spot ensures a thriving garden.
Gardening experts will advise that vegetable gardens have well-draining, rich soil, low weed pressure, and plenty of access to sun and water. These are essential things to consider when choosing a new garden plot. Perhaps you’re in a new home or gardening for the first time and want to transition your big backyard from turf to raised beds. Whatever the case is, picking the right location is crucial to your garden’s success.
If the space has never been a garden, I recommend preparing it long before you plan to grow food in it, up to a year in advance. Preparations may include soil testing, broad forking, or covering the surface with cardboard and compost. Consider trees and structures that may cast shadows, your accessibility to water, and weed pressure.
If you plan to use metal or wooden raised beds, level out the area and fill them ⅔ of the way with garden debris, kitchen scraps, decomposing logs, and grass clippings in the fall before your first season. Use topsoil, seed-starting mix, or potting soil for the remaining ⅓ and let it sit over the winter. Cover it with straw to keep it from eroding and weed seeds blowing in.
Test and Amend Your Soil
Regular soil testing helps maintain a healthy garden foundation.
Ensuring your soil is up to par is a critical element of gardening. When starting a new garden, I recommend annual soil testing. Year one will serve as a baseline, and since everything you grow will add or deplete nutrients from the soil, it’s good to check in after each season. With experience, you’ll be more able to pinpoint certain overages or shortages based on how your plants perform.
Local universities or extension offices offer professional analyses and the recommended soil amendments in their report to help you. Work them into the soil in the fall to give them time to incorporate.
Use at-home soil kits in subsequent years once your soil has been adjusted to a proper soil organic matter (SOM) and pH level and contains healthy amounts of nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus. These three elements and micronutrients, like copper, iron, and manganese, are vital building blocks to growing vegetables.
Most of the time, you’ll see the amounts listed as what you should apply per acre. Just adjust this to your square footage to ensure the proper application.
Prepare Garden Beds
Raised beds improve soil control, drainage, and garden access.
If your native soil is sandy, dry, compacted, or low in fertility, consider growing in raised beds. They offer less need to bend over, more control over your soil and amendments, season extension, and improved drainage. With so many colors, sizes, and heights on the market, surely something will fit into your garden.
Epic Gardening’s metal Birdies beds are customizable and come in sleek, modern colors with flexible designs. Cedar wooden raised beds are beautiful, eco-friendly, and long-lasting. Take your pick!
In-ground gardens, beds, and paths can be created by shoveling or raking soil into a mound. I always broadfork just before adding soil amendments to get them down into the soil, and then I rake the bed out flat. A flat surface makes direct sowing seeds more efficient, especially with a mechanical seeder. Many market gardening tool designs fit into a 30-inch bed system, so if you plan to use market garden tools, make your beds 30 inches wide.
When starting from scratch, pound a stake into each corner of the future bed. Next, run a tight string line from end to end. Follow this line when shaping the bed to create even paths.
Pro Tip: Suppress weeds by seeding clover or mowed yarrow as a living pathway, or use mulch. Any time soil is bare, it’s at risk of eroding or germinating stray weeds.
Select Your Veggies
Select heat-tolerant, drought-resistant crops for successful summer gardening.
Cold region growers typically grow colder, hardy vegetables and thoughtfully plan their summer gardens around the last spring and first fall frost. Conversely, growers in warm zones like Zone 8 should select crops to grow based on the length of the season, considering the heat and humidity during peak summer months.
While it’s true all vegetables need the sun to grow properly and produce delicious crops, too much harsh sun and extreme temperatures can be harmful and even deadly to gardens. Part of a successful garden starts in the planning stage, and knowing your garden’s limits is crucial to its success.
When reviewing seed catalogs, look for crops that can tolerate drought conditions, long days, and lots of sun. If the website has a filter feature, check the boxes that apply to your zone and growing conditions to get the seed company’s best recommendations. Choose crops that can tolerate heat and humidity and that claim to be bolt-resistant.
Here are some crops that will thrive in Zone 8 with the proper care:
- Potatoes
- Onions
- Beets
- Swiss chard
- Tomatoes
- Melons
- All types of squash-winter and summer
- Cabbage
- Eggplant
- Peppers
- Cucumbers
- Tomatoes
You might be wondering if you can grow cold-hardy vegetables in Zone 8, and the answer is yes! You’ll just want to adjust your sowing and transplanting dates to allow them enough time to establish outdoors and produce their crop before the risk of hot weather that may cause bolting.
In your zone, you can plant sooner than you think. I’ve made the mistake more than once of transplanting my broccoli too late in the spring, and I’ve lost it to the heat.
Timing is everything. Plan on growing cold-hardy vegetables in early spring and late fall for the best results and the least stress for you and your plants. Do you live in Zone 8a or 8b? While their average low temperature may only differ by 10°, this could make a massive difference to a young seedling.
Make a Sowing Schedule and Design Plans
Create detailed garden plans to ensure a successful growing season.
Gardeners across the globe are ordering seeds, designing gardens, and updating sowing schedules in the winter months when we’re desperate for anything to do that’s garden-related. Create a table that includes the following:
- Crop type and variety name
- Recommended sowing date
- Direct sow or transplant
- Germination rates
- Spacing requirements
- Days to maturity listed on the seed package
- Dates of step-up, hardening off, and transplant
- Date of first harvest and total amount harvested for the season
- Garden location
- Notes (save this area for specific notes like pests, spacing ideas, and issues that arose, like seedlings becoming rootbound or damping off)
It may sound silly if you’re new to gardening to draw out a map and plan the design, but it ensures you’ll safely and efficiently fit all your favorites into the allotted space without competition or plants getting shaded out. It will become second nature once you have gardened for a few years and practiced this technique. Reviewing past notes and garden plot maps is valuable information that will help guide your next season’s sowing schedule.
Use the USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Map to find your region’s last anticipated spring frost date. The last estimated frost date in Zone 8 is around March 12.
Seed packets recommend starting seeds indoors, for example, six to eight weeks before the last frost date. Count backward to see that it would be between January 14 and 28 for that crop. Add the appropriate date for each crop, or indicate N/A for direct sown items. When it comes time to sowing, sort the spreadsheet by recommended sowing date to quickly organize yourself each week.
Growers in Zone 8 can plant cold-hardy crops in the fall for a spring harvest, something northern growers have a more challenging time doing. We know certain varieties of winter-hardy crops have evolved to prevent their cells from bursting when cold temperatures and frost occur by concentrating simple sugars in their cells. The flavor is much sweeter when we eat them after this sugar concentration. A few crops this phenomenon occurs in and a few of my favorites:
- Carrots (‘Danvers 126’ is heat and frost-tolerant)
- Spinach (‘Bloomsdale’ is rich in flavor, color, and nutrition)
- Kale (‘Dwarf Blue Curled’ is ideal for kale chips)
- Cabbage (‘Red Acre’ stores well and resists cracking. Perfect for stir-fries)
- Radishes (‘Crimson Giant’ is the perfect spring and fall crop with mild flavor)
- Beets (‘Detroit Dark Red’ is gorgeous, frost-hardy, and doesn’t get woody when grown large)
- Asian Greens like tat soi and bok choy
These crops can not only handle a frost, but they’ll taste better after one occurs. Remember, overwintering crops may attract pests that are different from those during the summer, which you should prepare for.
Start Seeds Indoors
Begin seeds indoors early for better control and growth.
You can sow cold-hardy vegetables earlier than you might think in Zone 8, transplanting seedlings when growers up north barely get their seeds organized! The last spring frost will be in mid to late March, which you’ll consider when creating your sowing schedule.
Starting seeds indoors allows you more control of the environment, including temperature, water, and humidity levels. You can watch them closely, and they’ll have the best chance at success with the added protection during their earliest stage of life.
Most growers start their seed-starting area at a table or two in their basement, with grow lights and fans, changing and evolving with experience. The area may evolve into something more advanced and eventually make its way to an indoor garden building like a heated or semi-heated greenhouse.
Start these indoors:
- Head lettuce
- Celery
- Tomatoes
- Peppers
- Eggplant
- Broccoli
- Kale
- Swiss chard
- Cauliflower
- Onions, shallots, and leeks
A heat mat is a helpful effective tool when starting heat-loving vegetables like tomatoes indoors in late winter or early spring. Set them to a consistent temperature between 70 and 80°F (21 to 27°C) until germination. Lower the temperature at this time or remove it from the heat, but keep the tray in a warm environment with access to light.
Note that the ideal temperature will change slightly for each crop. Avoid letting the soil dry out in between watering sessions. Use air-pruning cell trays to step up seedlings to avoid rootbound and nutrient-deficient plants.
A gentle fan will encourage strong stems and resilient seedlings, which can be considered step one of hardening off. Hardening off introduces seedlings slowly to the outdoors, allowing them to acclimate to getting rained on, experiencing wind, and fluctuating temperatures.
Start this process about a week before transplanting, starting slowly on a cloudy or cool day. If this isn’t in the forecast, put them outside in the early morning with shade cloth, then move them back indoors. Work your way up to a full day uncovered. Limit water, but don’t allow them to dry out.
Direct Sow Seeds
Prep beds and direct sow cool-season crops for early harvest.
Grab your sowing schedule, and let’s get sowing! If you prepped your beds in the fall, they may require a little tweaking and a sprinkling of compost before you get started. Each year may be different. And, if you cover cropped your beds, terminate those entirely and reshape the beds before direct sowing.
Direct sow these:
- Greens like arugula and spinach
- Baby lettuce and baby kale mixes
- Sugar snap peas
- Radishes
- Herbs like dill and cilantro
- Carrots
- Potatoes
- Salad turnips
These seeds prefer the cool and moist nature of the spring soil to warm, indoor soil. They’ll germinate fine under these conditions, so starting them indoors is an unnecessary effort. Take note of recommendations such as “sow as soon as the soil can be worked” for the best results. Zone 8 growers can sow sugar snap peas as early as March.
Depending on the time of year, soil moisture, and precipitation received in your area, water the seeds well to ensure they have the consistent moisture required to break open their shell and sprout. Consider covering them with row cover to protect them from birds and retain moisture. Set traps if voles and mice are a threat.
As you direct sow further into the season, your method and which crops you sow may change slightly depending on the weather. For example, radishes and salad turnips struggle to germinate and adequately form a bulb-shaped fruit if temperatures are consistently above 80°F (27°C)—experiment using black shade cloth to cool down the air beneath, keep the soil moist, and increase germination rates.
Transplant Seedlings
Move seedlings carefully in early morning to reduce stress.
Another item on seed packets to closely follow is when it’s safe to transplant young seedlings. Transplant them after you’ve correctly hardened them off, but also consider the seven to ten-day forecast and watch for any unexpected cold or hot bursts. Transplanting is already a stressful event for seedlings, so make the rest of the factors as even as possible to avoid unnecessary transplant shock that may have lasting adverse effects.
When you’re ready to transplant, grab the maps you’ve drawn, your transplants, and a trowel. I recommend removing plants from their cell tray and gently laying them where you want them to live. This method prevents you from planting something and then moving it later. Take extra care when transplanting cucurbits which dislike their roots disturbed. Tuck them in gently and tamp down the soil around them.
Plan to transplant in the early morning before it gets too hot and water new transplants immediately. Cover them with insect netting or row cover if needed.
Access to Water and Irrigation Systems
Ensure easy water access to keep your garden thriving.
Having nearby access to water is crucial and will make gardening more enjoyable. Don’t plot your garden far away; you’ll be lugging water around all season. Find a customizable irrigation system to make your life easier. Learn the signs of overwatering and underwatering and how to remedy both situations appropriately. Knowing why your plants look or act a certain way will allow you to act before it’s too late.
Consider watering needs when plotting out your garden so all crops will perform better. This mindset will allow you to water each area according to their needs without wasting water. While overhead watering is acceptable for newly direct-sown seeds, it shouldn’t be your primary method of watering. Instead, rely on the deep watering that drip irrigation offers to reduce the risk of fungal disease while getting the water to the root systems.
In Zone 8, where summers can be oppressively hot, deep watering will be critical to your garden’s success. If you’re going on vacation, check out the Garden Oya™, which will slowly release water into the soil as needed so you don’t have to worry about coming home to dead plants.
Protect From Damaging Cold and Frost
Prepare to cover your garden for unexpected chilly nights.
Chilly nights in every growing zone may call for protection, so even in Zone 8, watch early spring forecasts for cold overnight lows and be prepared to cover your garden if necessary. We had an unexpectedly cool spring with extreme winds and freezing rain a few years back.
The first crops we plant outside the protected space in high tunnels are ‘Redbor’ and ‘Lacinato Dinosaur’ kale, which, theoretically, can tolerate a light frost. However, they became wind and frost-damaged, and their stems weakened from the constant wind, even with the protection of row cover. The combination of harsh winds, little sunlight, and rain was just too much.
When you learn that a crop is cold and frost-hardy, remember that young seedlings may experience stress and damage by harsh weather events, even something as hardy as broccoli or kale. Even in Zone 8, unexpected cold spring nights can arise, so cover crops if temperatures below 55°F (13°C) are forecasted.
Protect From Extreme Heat and Harsh Sun
Shade cloth and mulch can protect plants from summer stress.
You’re not alone if your crops have suffered from sun damage, drying soil, and wilted leaves during peak summer months in Zone 8. Invest in 30 to 50% shade cloth for the hottest parts of the season. For some parts of the country, it’s the only way to grow greens all season. The breathable material is available in white or black, offering different benefits.
Black shade cloth absorbs heat, keeping some off the plants, and is ideal for areas of harsh sun, hot temperatures, and drought conditions. White shade cloth reflects heat and bounces the sun’s UV rays around without reducing the light spectrum, meaning plants still get what they need.
For an organic and less expensive option, use compost, straw, or woodchips around your garden beds to retain moisture and reduce weed pressure and soil erosion. You must replace these every year or so as they break down.
Control Weeds
Effective weed control helps ensure a thriving, healthy garden.
Weeding is the bane of most gardeners existence, but studies show that working with your hands in the soil can be therapeutic. So get your hands a little dirty while ensuring that your crops can grow with minimal competition. Weeds can:
- Compete with veggies for resources like water, nutrients, and sunlight.
- Can harbor diseases and pests that will come after your veggies.
- Steal space and could become invasive.
- Can be a problem in subsequent years if allowed to go to seed.
When starting a new garden in a space that contains grass or lots of annual weeds, get them under control before sowing seeds there. Cardboard or silage tarps are effective and eco-friendly ways to terminate grass and weeds.
Pro Tip: Add a round or two of cover crops to revitalize the soil, break up compaction, add biomass, and suppress weeds.
Successively Plant
Sow successive crops to keep your garden thriving all season.
Many leafy green vegetables in Zone 8 will peter out after a few cuttings, often due to the garden diseases that spread quickly in extreme heat and high humidity. Sow successions of all your summer favorites so you’re not disappointed when your arugula bolts when temperatures spike.
You can even sow crops with long maturity times, like carrots, potatoes, and green beans, several times each season. Move them around your garden to avoid pests attacking the new successions, and cover them with insect netting if pest pressure is high.
Pro Tip: I’ve figured I should be sowing the next succession indoors on or around the same day as I’m transplanting the newest round of that crop for a constant supply. Direct sown successions depend more on how many days until maturity and how big your last succession was. For example, a full bed of carrots may last a long time, but they take longer to mature than radishes. Experiment with the timing.
Take Photos and Data Records
Documenting garden details with photos ensures you’ll remember everything.
We all think we’ll remember what we planted where and when, but in reality, you’ll likely be scratching your head trying to remember if you planted the eggplant over there in 2021 and wondering, “What year was it that we struggled with cucumber beetle pressure? “
I advise taking photos or videos where you audibly say your notes. For example, we trialed a new variety of garlic in some beds last year and a new spacing technique in others. I took a video and pointed to each bed, indicating what each bed featured. When I have more time in the winter, I create a folder for the year for easy access when needed, which has worked well for me.
Keeping proper records will allow you to analyze crops you grew, techniques you tried, and companion planting successes and failures. Note pest and disease pressure, crop rotations, successions that did well or that you’d skip next time, and other garden happenings.
While this isn’t an exhaustive list, here are a few things I recommend writing down throughout each year:
- Sowing, transplant, harvest dates, and the amount of each crop. Doing so allows you to determine your ROI on each crop.
- How were germination rates, and did anything surprise you? What could you do differently next time?
- Identify pests, weeds, and diseases. Take photos and notes. Contact your local extension office if you need help making an identification.
- What benefits did you notice from companion planting, if any?
- Did spacing work well, or were your plants cramped? Note fungal disease that you could have prevented with more airflow and pruning.
- Complete an old-fashioned SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis of your garden for concrete data. Review the last one, note the overlaps, and celebrate yearly wins.
It might seem like taking notes and completing a SWOT analysis seems formal and unnecessary, but you’ll be glad you did it when it comes time to select seeds, garden layout, and companions for the following year.
