Timing the Good Friday Planting Tradition

With temperatures well above average on some recent days, it has been tempting to plant the summer vegetable garden.

I’ve resisted, but it hasn’t been easy.

I’m waiting for Good Friday, the traditional spring planting day, to put out my summer vegetables.

At last, the waiting is over.

On Friday, I’ll transplant plant several varieties of squash and tomatoes in raised beds in the vegetable section of my garden. I’ll also sow seeds of two different kinds of heirloom green beans. Okra will have to wait. I know the ground isn’t that warm.

As I’ve been preparing the beds for the summer crops the last several weeks, I’ve had a recurring thought.Is Good Friday really the best time to plant summer vegetables?

Easter, after all, can be “early” or “late.”

This year, it’s late.

Which begs the question: How is the date for Easter determined?

Here’s the answer: The holiest day on the Christian calendar, Easter always fall on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox.

Which is when? Sometime between March 22 and April 25.

The vernal, or spring, equinox usually falls on March 20 but can occur on March 21. It marks the changing of the seasons, from winter to spring.

Thus, the earliest possible date for Easter is March 22, which would put Good Friday on March 20. The last possible date for Easter is April 25, which would put Good Friday on April 23.

That leaves traditionalists a wide range of middle ground for putting in summer vegetables – and a big margin of error for a Mother Nature cold snap that can freeze tender transplants. (Who can forget, for example, what is remembered in local lore as the Easter Freeze of 2007? Atlanta had an official low of 30 degrees and a wind chill of 23 degrees. Everyone replanted vegetables, and almost no one had flowering hydrangeas that year.)

So, is there a safer, more scientific approach than the Good Friday tradition to determine the best time to plant vegetables in the spring?

Lynwood L. Blackmon II, a DeKalb County Horticulture Agent in the DeKalb County Cooperative Extension office, has a suggestion: check out the Automated Environmental Monitoring Network site. It provides a city-by-city guide to last frost dates across Georgia. The reasoning is that it should be safe to plant summer veggies after the last frost.

The records for Dunwoody, however, show there is as wide a range for error with a last-frost guide as there is in following the Good Friday tradition.

The records on the site begin in 1996 and continue through 2010. In those 15 years, the date for the last frost ranged from March 8, 2010, when the low temperature was 30.9 degrees, to April 19, 2001, when the low was 31.6 degrees.

Clearly, the last frost date can vary as wildly in scientific data as it can in folklore.

This year, for example, we haven’t had a frost in Dunwoody since March 12, according to Sherry Kennedy, a Master Gardener in the DeKalb County Extension Service office.

So, what’s a gardener to do?

Perhaps we should just ignore the Good Friday planting tradition, throw out the historical record and go by the time-honored rule of thumb.

That rule, says Blackmon, is that the average last frost date in Dunwoody is April 15.

And perhaps that’s not a bad idea.

Pay your taxes and plant a vegetable garden. If you are like me, after you mail the check to Uncle Sam you’ll only be able to afford home-grown.