What to Plant in February in Zone 7

From a Handful of Crops to Dozens

The table jumps hard this month. Peas, potatoes, spinach, kale, cabbage, broccoli, and most of the classic cool-season lineup all open at once, a sharp change from January's short list of roots and alliums. Your last frost is still roughly nine weeks off, so nearly everything going in now is chosen for its ability to take a light frost on the chin.

Parsnip, leek, and celeriac, the three crops that carried January alone, close out this month. Get the last of them in during the first half of February; each needs a long season to size up, and pushing the planting later eats directly into how big the roots get before summer heat arrives.

Peas and Potatoes Share One Rule

Both crops want soil that has actually warmed, not just soil that looks plantable. Push a soil thermometer 2 inches down; peas germinate reliably once it holds at 45 degrees for three straight days, and seed potato pieces rot in ground colder than that instead of sprouting.

Cut seed potatoes into pieces roughly the size of a golf ball, each carrying at least one eye, and set the cut sides up somewhere warm and airy rather than planting straight away. The face is ready once it looks dry and leathery rather than pale and wet; skipping that wait is the single most common reason a seed piece rots instead of growing.

Inoculate pea seed with a fresh rhizobium powder right before sowing if you haven't grown peas or beans in that bed within the last two years. A bed with recent legume history usually carries enough bacteria on its own.