When to Plant Potatoes in Virginia: Spring and Fall Dates by Zone

Open Virginia Cooperative Extension’s calendar to the potato line and you find 6 zones, each with its own spring and fall entries. Zone 6a starts latest, on April 1, while Zone 8a starts on February 20: 40 days between the two.

Potatoes: the Virginia table

Table 5 of the same guide puts potatoes at 10 plants per person, with 1 planting in spring and summer and none in fall.

Reading the Virginia Cooperative Extension table

The guide warns that Virginia’s mountainous topography creates a diversity of hardiness zones over a small area, and it gives Roanoke County as an example: four zones, with a 30-day planting difference between them. Its first table prints the median last spring frost and first fall frost as a range for each zone, for example April 5-15 and October 25-November 5 in zone 7b.

Where a cell reads “Not recommended”, the source gives no planting window for that season, and this page leaves it that way.

Do potatoes get an indoor start?

The general sources have little to say about starting potatoes indoors, since UNH has them go straight into the ground.

Potatoes are planted as seed potatoes, not seedlings, so none of the saved seed-starting tables applies; UNH’s timing is counted from the last frost instead.

UNH’s own timing for potatoes is 1 to 2 weeks before the last frost, so Virginia’s printed window and UNH’s rule of thumb can be set side by side.

Where the frost dates fall in Virginia

The dates come straight from NOAA’s frost and freeze normals at the 32°F threshold; the frost dates tool shows earlier and later odds for the same stations.

Virginia Cooperative Extension does not say which of its zones each city falls in, so the table does not guess.

• Roanoke Regional Airport in the frost dates tool
• Charlottesville Airport in the frost dates tool
• Richmond International Airport in the frost dates tool
• Richmond frost dates
• Norfolk International Airport in the frost dates tool
• Washington DC Dulles Airport in the frost dates tool

Worked example

Start from Roanoke Regional Airport: the station’s median last spring freeze is April 3, and its median first fall freeze is November 1.

The calendar does not say which zone Roanoke Regional Airport belongs to, so set the date against the rows at each end. Zone 8a opens February 20, 42 days before that date; Zone 6a opens April 1, 2 days before it.

The offsets will shift by a few days with every revision of the normals, so use them as a rough guide to which row to trust and not as a deadline.

Before you rely on these dates

The guide says actual last and first killing frost dates vary with local conditions and from year to year, and invites gardeners to favor earlier or later dates within a range.

Treat the table as a starting range and look at the ten-day forecast before setting out anything tender.

Related pages

• Spring planting planner
• Frost dates by station
• Frost dates by city
• All state planting pages
• How we check our sources
• Tomatoes in Virginia
• Peppers in Virginia
• Potatoes in Missouri