When do nursery and garden centers usually start getting vegetable plants in such as tomatoes, peppers, lettuce etc.?

Answer #1 · Gardenality.com's Answer · Hi Ed - This is a very good question. I own a nursery and garden center in central Georgia and we usually start stocking warm season vegetable plants when the weather forecasters say that all chances of frost has passed. Tomatoes can handle some cooler weather (45 degrees or so), however you want to wait to plant peppers, eggplants and other very tender vegetable plants until the temperatures are steadily above 55 degrees at night. Planting these tender vegetables too early, when temperatures drop below 55 degrees, can cause serious damage to plants that they won't recover from. So it's best to wait rather than waist your money and effort planting them only to have plants damaged by cool weather. Many seasoned veteran gardeners wait until Good Friday at the earliest to plant vegetables in their gardens but, even then, keep an eye on weather forecasts. I've seen frosts in our area as late as late April, though this is a very rare occurence. Regarding lettuce and other cool season vegetable plants, these are more cold hardy and nurseries might start carrying them as early as mid- to late-March. If the area you live anbd garden in warms up early (March-April) the earlier you get these cool season veggies planted the better. Reason being, many cool seaswon veggoe plants will "bolt" when the weather gets too hot.

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