You’ll find a ‘days to maturity’ number on almost all seed packets at garden centers: 60 days for bush beans, 75 for tomatoes, 30 for radishes. Lots of gardeners take this number as a promise, beginning the count from the day they plant and fully anticipating being able to gather their vegetables in precisely that amount of time. So when the harvest doesn’t appear for weeks longer than they planned, or even shows up a little early now and then, they get annoyed. However, the seeds themselves aren’t at fault, nor is the weather or how you’re looking after them. The issue is that most people don’t understand what ‘days to maturity’ really tells you.
The Starting Point Is Different for Different Crops
Something seed packets almost never tell you, and it’s important, is where you begin counting the days to when you can harvest. It depends on if you plant the seeds directly in the ground or if you start them inside and then move them out. With things you directly sow, like beans, peas, corn, radishes, carrots, lettuce, the number of days to maturity begins on the day you put the seed in the garden. But for plants you start inside and then plant as seedlings, such as tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, and squash, the ‘days to maturity’ are calculated from when the seedling actually goes into the garden, not from when you originally planted the seed indoors.
Therefore, if a tomato packet says “75 days to maturity”, it’s 75 days from when you put the young plant in the garden. Given that tomatoes are generally grown inside for six to eight weeks before going out, it’s actually about 115 to 130 days in all from seed to harvest.
Why Actual Harvest Times Vary From the Packet
How long your vegetables actually take to grow, even if you begin at the right time, will often be 10 to 20 days off the time on the seed packet. Seed packet dates usually come from test gardens where everything is as good as it can be: the temperature stays at the best level, plants get perfect amounts of water, full sunshine, and good soil. It’s pretty rare for a typical home garden to have all of that. Growth gets slower and things take longer to mature in unusually cold weather. If it’s cloudy, plants have less sunlight for making energy. Plants won’t develop as quickly with bad soil or if you don’t water regularly. But very hot summers with long, sunny days, on the other hand, might make your produce mature even faster than the packet says.
How to Use Days to Maturity for Garden Planning
Good gardeners don’t think of “days to maturity” as a strict countdown. It’s more a way of judging how long things will take compared to other types of tomatoes. So, a tomato said to be ready in 60 days will be ready to pick before one that’s 85 days, and it won’t likely be exactly on that number of days. This comparing of times is particularly helpful for people in places that don’t have long summers; they need to choose tomatoes that will ripen before the first frost in autumn. To decide if a particular tomato has a chance of being harvested, you can take its “days to maturity”, subtract that from the date of your first expected frost, and then add on fourteen days to be safe.
Key Takeaway
When a seed packet says how many days until something is ready to harvest, that time is calculated from when you first put the seeds directly into the ground for things you’ve planted outside as seeds. However, for plants you began inside and then put in the garden as little plants, the count starts from when you put them in the garden. A lot of the time gardeners are puzzled when their crops take weeks longer to harvest than they thought, and that’s because of this one difference. It’s much better to use the number on the packet to get a general sense of timing, and to allow for the fact that growing happens in the real world, with all its complications, to get a plan that’s actually likely to be correct.
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