Planning Your 2026 Vegetable Garden in December

It’s December in Redmond, which means it’s raining sideways and I’m at the kitchen table with a stack of seed catalogs, a cold cup of coffee, and opinions. Strong ones. This is my favorite part of gardening, honestly. Nothing has failed yet.

Planning in December sounds overly ambitious, but January goes fast and the good stuff sells out. I’ve lost a specific pepper variety to a sold-out page more than once. Never again. (Narrator: it happened again.)

Start With What Actually Happened This Year

Before you draw a single square on graph paper, sit down and be honest with yourself about 2025. What did you actually eat? What just sat there? I grew eight zucchini plants my first year because the packet said “productive.” Understatement of the century. My neighbors stopped making eye contact by August.

Write it down. What worked, what didn’t, what you wished you’d planted more of. I keep a notes page in a cheap composition notebook I’ve been using since 2019. It’s ugly and has soil on it and it’s genuinely useful.

Map It Out Before You Order Anything

Graph paper. That’s the whole tip. One square equals one foot, sketch your beds, note which direction is south. Takes twenty minutes and saves you from buying way more seeds than you have room for. (I say this while eyeing a fourth raised bed I absolutely do not need.)

Here in zone 8b we get real growing seasons for cool-weather crops in spring AND fall, which a lot of people don’t take advantage of. When you’re mapping, think in two waves: what goes in March through May, and what goes back in August for fall harvest. Same beds, double the output. Which, now that I think about it, is the cheapest way to get more garden without building anything new.

Decide What You’re Actually Starting From Seed

This is where I save the most money every year, and also where I’ve made the most mistakes. Starting tomatoes from seed indoors is satisfying and costs a fraction of nursery transplants. Starting celery from seed is an exercise in patience that I do not recommend to anyone who has other things going on in their life.

Good candidates for direct sowing here: lettuce, spinach, radishes, peas, beans, kale, beets, chard. Just stick them in the ground at the right time. No fuss. For things like tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant, you’ll want to start indoors in late February or early March. Mark that on the calendar now, because February Shawn always thinks he has more time than he does.

If you’re new to seed starting, seed starting mix is worth buying separately from regular potting soil. Learned that the hard way when half my pepper seedlings damped off in heavy soil. Fun times.

Order Seeds Before February

Seed catalogs are free. Most companies will mail you one if you ask, and flipping through an actual paper catalog is one of the better ways to spend a grey December evening. I usually end up circling varieties I’ve never tried, then talking myself out of half of them because I don’t have room.

Focus on varieties that do well in cool, overcast conditions. We’re not Sacramento. Long-season tomatoes that need 90 days of blazing sun are going to disappoint you here. Look for anything labeled “early” or with days-to-maturity under 70 for tomatoes. Willamette, Siletz, Legend, Stupice. Those names come up for a reason in PNW gardens.

And lettuce. Plan to succession sow every two to three weeks starting in March so you don’t end up with a two-week salad window and then nothing. I planted all my lettuce at once for three straight years before someone finally explained that wasn’t the goal. Lettuce learn from our mistakes. (Sorry. Not sorry.)

One Cheap Tool Worth Getting Now

If you don’t have a soil thermometer, get one before spring. Inexpensive ones work fine. Knowing your actual soil temp takes the guesswork out of direct sowing. Spinach germinates at 35 degrees. Beans want 60. The difference between planting at the right time and planting two weeks too early is the difference between germination and just feeding the slugs.

The Part Most People Skip

Rotation. If you grew tomatoes in a bed this year, don’t put tomatoes there in 2026. Same family of plants pulls the same nutrients and invites the same soil diseases. Move nightshades (tomatoes, peppers, eggplant) around on a loose three-year rotation if you have the space. Your graph paper map from 2025 is useful here, which is another reason to keep notes. You reap what you sow, and also what you wrote down.

So. December is the time to plan, not panic. Sketch your beds, review last year, order seeds early, and write down when you need to start things indoors. The garden doesn’t start in spring. It starts now, at the kitchen table, with a cold cup of coffee and too many opinions.

Photo by Matt Baker on Unsplash