One of the first steps you take when you are getting a good idea your gardening schedule is find your USDA Zone info. The zone info helps tell us things like average date of last frost and lowest expected temperature for your area.

A way of making a decision about when it's a good idea to plant echinacea is to examine the USDA zone info for El Dorado.

Planting Calendar for Echinacea

Frost tolerance for echinacea:	Tolerant of a very small amount of frost.
When to plant:	Up to 3 weeks before last frost.

Echinacea do ok in a tiny bit of cold which tells us that you can plant them a bit earlier in the year than plants that are more sensitive to the cold.

The earliest that you can plant echinacea in El Dorado is March. However, you really should wait until April if you don't want to take any chances.

The last month that you can plant echinacea and expect a good harvest is probably August. Any later than that and your echinacea may not have a chance to grow to maturity. You can get started a little bit earlier by starting your echinacea indoors.

Last Frost Date

On average the last frost when the weather gets warmer is on March 15 in El Dorado. You can expect an average low temperature of 10°F in the coldest months of winter.

Just be sure to remember that USDA zone info for El Dorado is just an average and the actual date of last frost will vary from year to year. Since half of the time in El Dorado last frost occurs after March 15 be ready to cover your echinacea if you have one of those late frosts.

USDA Zone Info for El Dorado

Here is the info for USDA Zone 8a.

Average Date of Last Frost (spring)	March 15
Average Date of First Frost (fall)	November 15
Lowest Expected Low	10°F
Highest Expected Low	15°F

This means that on a really cold year, the coldest it will get is 10°F. On most years you should be prepared to experience lows near 15°F.

Plants to Grow in El Dorado

You may be interested in your other planting guides for El Dorado.