Free preview · Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas

DFW Organic Gardening Guide

A region-specific reference for North Texas. The pages below are excerpted from the full guide. Roughly 5% of the total content.

Excerpt · Introduction

DFW is a strange place to garden.

The summers are too hot for the cool-climate North American canon, the winters too mild for what northern catalogs assume, and the soil is alkaline clay where most general advice quietly assumes something more forgiving. The catalogs, the gardening blogs, the YouTube videos out of Oregon or Vermont, they're written for somewhere else. A lot of what comes up on a casual search routinely fails here.

This guide is a counterweight. Inside you'll find every vegetable, herb, fruit, flower, native, cover crop, vine, and ground cover that performs across the DFW metroplex and the broader North Texas region, with cultivar names and planting dates tuned to the local calendar. After that, pages on soil-building in Blackland clay, seed starting, composting, vermicomposting, and the less-common pieces of permaculture, worm towers, ollas, biochar.

It's an organic guide top to bottom, and that covers pest control as much as fertility. No synthetic insecticides, no broad-spectrum herbicides, no chemical fungicides, no soluble-salt fertilizers, no chemistry-first soil amendments. Pest pressure gets handled with beneficial-insect habitat, row covers, kaolin clay, neem, insecticidal soap, Bt, spinosad where it earns its keep, and hand-removal where the population stays small.

You won't find NPK numbers in this guide, and that's deliberate. A healthy garden bed doesn't need bagged fertilizer; good compost plus a working soil food web supplies everything the plants actually take up. Plants need at least 17 essential elements to complete their life cycle. A bag of 10-10-10 supplies three of them. The rest come from somewhere else, the parent rock the soil sits on, the organic matter you bury in it, and the microbes that mine, transport, and release them.

Excerpt · Where We Are

The four constraints that shape the year.

The Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex straddles two distinct ecoregions: the Eastern Cross Timbers (sandy loam over much of Tarrant County and the western half of the metro) and the Blackland Prairie (deep alkaline clay across most of Dallas County and east). The growing year here is shaped by four hard constraints: an alkaline-clay or alkaline-amended soil that locks up phosphorus and iron, a chill-hour window narrow enough to disqualify most northern fruit cultivars, a punishing July-August heat that sterilizes tomato and pepper pollen, and a squash-vine-borer pressure that ends most Cucurbita pepo by mid-summer.

HardinessUSDA 8b (2023 map)

SoilAlkaline clay, pH 7.5–8.2

Chill Hours600–900

Last FrostMid-March (avg.)

First FrostNovember 22 (NWS DFW normal)

Frost-Free Days~255

Summer Extremes100°F+ days, mid-70s nights, 80°F+ stretches in heat waves

RainfallWet spring, dry mid-summer

Key Pest PressureSquash vine borer, Pierce's disease, fire ants

Everything in the full guide is filtered through those four constraints. Varieties are chosen because they actually finish their cycle here, not because they win taste tests in cooler climates.

Excerpt · Monthly Planting Calendar (warm-season subset)

What goes in the ground when.

Soil temperature at 4 inches gates everything below, not the wall-calendar date alone. Okra, sweet potatoes, melons, and peanuts all want 70°F+ soil and rot or stall in anything cooler, and DFW typically hits that mark in mid-May. The full guide carries a 60-row calendar covering warm-season vegetables, cool-season vegetables, roots, alliums, herbs, berries, vines, and cover crops. A small slice of the warm-season block is shown below.

Crop	F	M	A	M	J	J	A	S	O
Tomato	S	S	T	H	H	H	H
Pepper	S	S	T		H	H	H	H
Beans, Bush			D	D	H	H	D	H	H
Cucumber			D	D	H	H	H
Okra				D	H	H	H	H	H
Sweet Potato				D				H	H

SStart indoors TTransplant out DDirect sow HHarvest window

Excerpt · Sample crop entry

What a crop page looks like.

Each of the ~150 crop entries in the full guide follows the same shape: variety list with cultivar names and reliability tags, planting table calibrated to DFW dates, and meta paragraphs covering the parts that vary by crop (about, harvest, watering, pest pressure, tips). Here's the okra entry as a representative sample.

Okra

Hill Country Red60–70dMost ReliableHeirloom Stewart's Zeebest~70dBest FlavorOpen-Pollinated Clemson Spineless55–65dFastestHeirloom

Indoor Start	Method	Sun	Spacing	Yield
None	Direct sow ~May 15 when soil holds 70°F+ at 4"	True full sun, thrives at 100°F+	1" deep · 12–18" × 36" (taller varieties want 18", shorter 12")	0.29–0.33 lb/sf/yr

About Okra is a tropical mallow from East Africa, related to hibiscus and cotton. It was brought to the Americas through the slave trade and became central to the cooking of the Gulf Coast and the broader American South. The edible part is an immature seed pod, harvested small (under 4 inches) before it becomes fibrous. The mucilage that makes it slimy when stewed is the same compound that thickens gumbo. It's one of the most heat-tolerant vegetable crops and produces heavily through the worst of summer.

Harvest Pods are ready ~3–4 days after flowering, harvested at 3–4" long while still tender, pick every 1–2 days or pods turn woody and yields drop. Cut pods from the plant with a knife or pruners (woody stems will not snap).

Watering Okra survives drought but yields triple with consistent moisture, water deeply every 7–10 days through pod set.

Pests & Diseases Stink bugs and leaf-footed bugs are the top pod pests in DFW. Both pierce developing pods, leaving warty, curled fruit. Handpick early morning when they're sluggish, or spray kaolin clay as a physical barrier. Aphids cluster on leaf undersides; a hard water blast knocks most off. Root-knot nematodes are the chronic soil problem, okra is one of the most susceptible vegetable crops. Rotate with nematode-resistant crops, interplant marigolds as a trap crop, and build organic matter with compost and poultry manure to suppress populations. Fusarium wilt has no resistant varieties; rotate 3+ years off the same bed.

Tips Hill Country Red runs ~6 ft tall, at the upper end among DFW okra. Soak seeds 12 hours before sowing. Pick every 2–3 days at 3" pods or they get woody. Plant lettuce on north side as living shade in late spring. Date moved from the older "April 1" recommendation, okra rots in cool wet soil under 70°F, AgriLife okra guide explicitly waits until mid-May.

Citation comments are stripped here for readability; the full guide carries inline source citations to Texas A&M AgriLife, NCSU, OSU, and peer-reviewed research throughout every entry.

Scope

What's inside the full guide.

Roughly 200 pages. Organized as a reference, not a narrative; you can jump straight to the crop you're planting. Citation-backed throughout, with sources tilted toward Texas A&M AgriLife Extension, other US Cooperative Extension services, and peer-reviewed research.

Front matter:

Introduction, Where We Are, Monthly Planting Calendar (full 60-row version), Watering, Reading the Variety Lists

Soil & biology:

Starting an Organic Garden Bed, Seed Starting, Composting & the Soil Food Web (worm bins, vermicomposting, hot vs. cold compost, bubblers, in-ground worm towers, hügelkultur, ollas, biochar, animal manure NPK)

Crops, every variety with cultivar names and planting dates calibrated to DFW:

Warm-season vegetables (tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, beans, cucurbits, corn, okra, sweet potato, heat-lover specialty)
Cool-season vegetables (greens, brassicas, kohlrabi)
Roots and alliums
Annual and perennial herbs
Berries, fruit trees, vines, and nuts
Companion flowers, beneficial trees, natives, cover crops, ground covers

Each crop entry carries a planting table (indoor start, method, sun, spacing, yield), a variety list with cultivar names tagged for reliability and flavor, and meta paragraphs covering watering nuance where it differs from the front-of-guide default, plus pest and disease pressure specific to that crop in this region.