This free artichoke planting calendar helps you plan a full artichoke season from your frost dates, with indoor sowing, transplanting and harvest dates. It runs fully in your browser, needs no account, and gives a clear plan in seconds, so you can stop guessing and start with dates and numbers you can trust. It is made for home gardeners, not for professional growers, and every field is explained in plain words on the tool itself.
To use it, fill in the fields above and press the button. The tool checks your numbers, runs the calculation, and shows the result right below the tool, together with a simple drawing of your plan where a drawing applies. If a number looks wrong, change it and press the button again. Nothing is saved on a server, and you can use the tool as many times as you like, for one bed or for many.
It counts backwards and forwards from your two frost dates using artichoke offsets. Indoor sowing falls 10 weeks before the last spring frost, because artichoke seedlings need a long indoor start. Transplanting falls 2 weeks after the last frost, when the soil has warmed and a light frost is unlikely. Harvest starts 120 days after transplanting, which is the time a healthy plant needs to form buds, and it runs until your first autumn frost ends the season.
For example, with a last frost on 2026-04-15 and a first frost on 2026-10-15, you sow indoors on 2026-02-04, transplant on 2026-04-29, and harvest from 2026-08-27. With an earlier spring and a later autumn, a last frost on 2026-03-20 and a first frost on 2026-11-01 move indoor sowing to 2026-01-09 and harvest to 2026-08-01.
Reading the result is simple: take the headline dates or counts as your starting point, then check them against what you know about your own garden. Soil, sun, rain and local frost all change from one garden to the next, so a tool result is a strong guide, not a promise, and your own judgement still matters for the final decision.
Start artichokes indoors in pots you can move, because seedlings started too early suffer if a cold snap keeps them inside for weeks. Harden plants off for a week before transplanting, putting them outside for a few hours a day, so the move does not shock them.
A common mistake is trusting a single plan and never checking it again. Re-run the tool when your frost dates change, when you change the size of a bed, or when a crop fails, because stale plans quietly lead to crowded beds and missed sowing windows. Keep a short note of each result with the crop name and the date, so you can compare one season with the next without searching through old messages.
Over the next few weeks, use this tool as part of a simple weekly routine. Set aside a short time each week to check your beds, water what needs water, and review what the plan says should happen next. A pattern over several weeks is far more useful than one good or bad day, because it shows which crops grow well in your soil, which beds stay too wet, and where your time actually goes. Small steady habits, repeated every week, build a garden that is easier to run and easier to enjoy, and this tool is meant to make one small part of that routine faster and clearer.
This tool gives estimates for everyday garden planning only and does not replace professional growing advice. Use it to plan, to compare and to keep clear records, and ask a local expert when a decision involves large costs, rare plants or plant health problems. Try it with your own numbers now, and come back whenever a new bed, a new crop or a new season needs a quick, honest plan.