Short-Season Variety Finder

In practice, any frost-free season under about 120 days. That covers much of the Prairies, northern Ontario and Quebec, the northern BC interior, and the territories. Prince Albert runs around 95 days; Winnipeg and Calgary around 115–120; Toronto approaches 195, and the BC coast is well over 200. That spread is exactly why American gardening advice — or even southern Ontario advice — fails on the Prairies: the crop is the same, but the variety has to be different.

It depends on the crop, and this trips a lot of people up. For direct-sown crops — carrots, beans, radishes, lettuce — the count starts at sowing. For transplanted crops like tomatoes, peppers and eggplant, the packet almost always counts from transplant into the garden, not from the indoor sowing date. That's why a 65-day tomato is not ready 65 days after you sowed it in March: you add the indoor head-start weeks on top. This tool uses the same convention and compares the packet figure against your outdoor window.

Because packet days assume good conditions. A cold spring, slow-warming soil, a grey week, or a checked transplant easily adds a week or two to the real timetable — and the frost dates themselves are averages, so in half of all years your frost arrives earlier than normal. A 10-day margin is cautious without being pessimistic. If you garden on an exposed site or at elevation, allow more.

Because that figure is not reliable enough to publish as data. A variety's days-to-maturity genuinely varies between seed suppliers and with growing conditions, and an audit of our own guides found the same variety quoted with different figures in different places. Rather than pick one number arbitrarily and present it as authoritative, the tool gives you the threshold to stay under and lets you read the real figure off the packet in your hand. That's also more useful — the threshold works against any catalogue.

Three levers, easiest first. Start seed indoors — that is what makes tomatoes and peppers possible on the Prairies at all. Protect both ends of the season: frost blankets, low tunnels, cloches and cold frames comfortably buy two to four weeks at each end. And warm the soil in spring with black plastic or clear sheeting before planting heat-loving crops. Combined, those often add a usable month — enough to bring a variety inside your window that otherwise wouldn't fit.

It's an average, not a guarantee — in roughly half of years frost arrives earlier. Use it to plan what seed to buy, then watch the actual forecast as the season closes. Our Frost Tonight tool reads the coming night's low for your city, which is the right question once harvest is close.