Draft. These eight squares were drawn from the course’s crop table and the Gila Valley’s own frost dates, and have not yet been checked against a real bed. It goes on sale once it has.

Bed map · Fall (Aug–Oct) · heat track

Fall 2026 — the heat-track 4×8

Greens, roots, kale, chard, garlic; sown while it's hot.

Green squares stay past this window. An empty bed, or a summer bed you are clearing. Nothing has to be standing for this map to work.

The eight squares

	Square	Plant window	Companions	Pull / leave
A	Leaf lettuce Direct seed	9 to 5 weeks before first fall frost	Radish in G shades nothing and is gone before lettuce fills.	Take outer leaves from week 5. Pull at the first hard freeze or when it bolts, whichever comes first.
B	Spinach Direct seed · stays through winter	8 to 4 weeks before first fall frost	Beside lettuce so the two get one watering rhythm.	Picks through winter on this ground. Bolts at the first warm week of spring — that is its end, not a failure.
C	Carrots Direct seed · stays through winter	13 to 8 weeks before first fall frost	Beets in D — same water, same thinning day.	Leave them. Frost sweetens them; pull as needed through winter. Anything left in April goes to seed.
D	Beets Direct seed	10 to 6 weeks before first fall frost	Carrots in C.	Roots at 2–3 in. Greens are food from week 4. Pull the square by the first hard freeze.
E	Kale Transplant · stays through winter	8 to 5 weeks before first fall frost	Chard in F. Both take the same aphid check every week.	Never, this window. It stands through winter and picks for months. It is the square Spring 2027 leaves alone.
F	Swiss chard Transplant · stays through winter	7 to 4 weeks before first fall frost	Kale in E.	Stands through winter here. Cut outer leaves, leave the centre. Pull in spring when it sends up a stalk.
G	Radish + arugula Direct seed	6 to 2 weeks before first fall frost	Lettuce in A. Radish is out in 25 days and leaves the square to arugula.	Radish at 1 in across — pull one and look. Arugula until it gets too peppery or the hard freeze takes it.
H	Garlic Cloves · stays through winter	2 weeks before to 2 weeks after first fall frost	Nothing. It holds this square until next June.	Not until the lower leaves brown next summer. The Spring and Heat 2027 maps both leave H alone.

Planting-day notes, one per square

A — Shade cloth over this square until afternoon highs are under 95°F. Resow the gaps every two weeks.
B — Will not germinate in hot soil. If a sowing does not come up in 10 days the soil was still too warm; wait a week and resow.
C — 14–21 days to germinate and a surface crust stops them dead. Keep the top half-inch damp the whole time, board over it if you have to. Late? Sow anyway and expect small roots.
D — Each seed is a cluster. Thin to 3–4 in or you get leaves and no bulbs.
E — Two plants in the square, not four. Direct seed instead two weeks earlier if you have no transplants.
F — Two plants. Takes a light frost without cover; cover at 28°F.
G — The fast square. Sow half and half, resow the radish side every ten days. This is the square to fill if you are late on everything else.
H — Pointed end up, 2 in deep, 6 in apart — about sixteen cloves. Mulch it. It is the one thing planted AT the frost, not before it.

Do not plant this window, on the heat track

Tomato, pepper, eggplant from seed. They need 60–90 warm days after transplant. Sown now on this track they meet the frost as flowers.
Bush beans, cucumber, squash. Warm-soil crops that a September sowing rushes into cool nights; the yield is not worth the square.
Okra and yardlong beans. Heat-track summer crops. Their window closed in July.
Peas. Tempting in fall here, but on this ground the window between 'soil cool enough' and 'first freeze' is too short for a crop. They go in the Spring map.

Running late?

More than two weeks past a window: transplant instead of seed where the square allows it, or give the square to G's radish and arugula. Do not sow carrots or spinach into a square you cannot keep damp — that is where the fall bed quietly fails.

Leave these squares

Squares C, E, F and H stand through winter. The Spring 2027 map plans around them — it does not pretend the bed resets.

Use it with the free Plotline dates

Every window below counts back from YOUR first fall frost. Paste it from Plotline and the file prints the dates. Get them at Plotline → When does it freeze here?. The file you download has two date boxes; fill them and every window above becomes a real date.

What you get

One file, bedmap-fall-2026-heat.html. Opens in any browser, prints on one page, works with the wifi off.
The grid above, the eight square notes, the do-not-plant list for this window, and the leave-these-squares note for the next map.
Your two frost dates saved in the file, turning the windows into dates.

Not included

Irrigation design, the rest of the homestead, and a Plotline subscription. Frost dates are free on Plotline; this map needs nothing paid to work.

Want week-by-week with worksheets? That is First Ninety, the 12-week notebook — the map is the bed, the book is the season.

Tony’s AZ Homestead, Pima, Arizona — the Gila Valley. Payment is handled by Stripe; this site never sees your card.