In case you didn't grow up growing food

Except for the part about the plant being happy and the gardener looking competent, this is totally us. Image via Wikipedia

At LOVESalem HQ, we're barely even novice gardeners.

In fact, we're still at that embarrassing stage where it seems like our most common activity could be described as laying down the experiences for what we hope will become funny gardening stories about our early years.

We hope that, years from now, when our vegetables are lush and our fruit trees overwhelm us with their fecundity, we'll be telling those stories.

We found a cool cheat sheet though, one that should help bring those halcyon years about sooner: What to plant when, month by month, by region. All praise to Mother Earth News for this great service.

For instance, from there, you can go here, to a link to a great table showing, for virtually every place in Oregon, the dates for the 10%, 50%, and 90% chance of frosty, freezing, and hard frost weather (frosty = 36F; freezing = 32F, and hard frost = 28F) and the number of frost-free days per year and total number of days below the three threshold temperatures (again, all given in terms of 10, 50, and 90% probabilities). An invaluable chart to helping answer the question about "What should I be planting now?"

UPDATE: Rather than getting rid of farmland in the city, Salem should be following Milwaukee's lead.