Place guide
Planting zones in Salinas, CA
This metro spans USDA zones 8b to 10b, so there is no single zone for Salinas, CA and anyone who gives you one is rounding. 43% of its ZIP codes are zone 9b; the rest are not.
Your ZIP code
Get the exact answer for your address
Everything above describes Salinas, CA as a whole. Hardiness zones and freeze dates are published per ZIP code, so yours is exact — enter it and this page will tell you your zone, which NOAA station it comes from and how far away that station is.
Salinas, CA does not have one planting answer
Its own weather stations disagree about 32 of the 32 crops in this table right now, so any single list would be wrong for part of the metro area. That is not a gap in the data — it is what the data says.
- Shortest season
- 165 days
PRIEST VALLEY, CA US (USC00047150) - Longest season
- 365 days
MONTEREY, CA US (USC00045795)
200 days of growing season separate those two stations, and both serve ZIP codes in Salinas, CA. The ZIP lookup above answers for one address instead of averaging a place that has no average.
Why the hardiness zone does not settle this
A USDA zone is a winter-minimum statistic. It was never a growing-season one, and it does not behave like one: within a single zone the growing season runs a median 54 days wider at the 10th–90th percentile, and annual growing degree days vary by 2.02×.
The zones also overlap rather than stack — 30% of zone 6b freezes before the median zone 6a station. The zone tells you what survives your winter; the station tells you what finishes before your autumn.
The growing season at one or more of this metro area's stations crosses 1 January, so a one-year bar would have to start the season after it ended. No chart is drawn rather than a misleading one.
Which zone you are in depends where you are
Salinas, CA covers 5 hardiness zones. A guide that gives the metro one zone has picked whichever is largest and rounded everyone else into it — which is fine for the 43% in zone 9b and wrong for the other 57%. Here is the actual split.
| Zone | ZIP codes | Share | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 9b | 13 | 43% | |
| 10a | 9 | 30% | |
| 9a | 6 | 20% | |
| 8b | 1 | 3% | |
| 10b | 1 | 3% |
Zones are published per ZIP code, so yours is exact even though the metro's is not. The hardiness tool will tell you which one you are in.
Your freeze dates
No freeze range is shown for Salinas, CA, because the freeze window here crosses New Year, so an earliest-to-latest range would be arithmetic on dates that do not sit in order. The tools below still answer for individual ZIP codes here, and will say what applies.
Your growing season
NOAA publishes a growing-season length for each station, and across the 13 stations serving Salinas, CA it runs 165–365 days . That figure is published, not computed from the two freeze dates — subtracting one from the other gives the wrong answer wherever a season crosses New Year. Mean summer high (June–August) runs 67–99 °F , at or above the 90 °F point where cool-season crops bolt and tomato and pepper pollen fails — so midsummer sowings of lettuce and its relatives are worth holding here. Summer rain over the same months runs 0.1–0.3" across those 12 stations, against the rough inch a week — about 13 inches over the same 92 days — that a vegetable garden is usually reckoned to want. The middle station covers about 1% of it, so a summer garden here is watered rather than rained on. The inches are NOAA's published normals; the inch a week is a rule of thumb, and it takes no account of a 76 °F summer afternoon drying the soil faster than a cool one.
What survives the winter changes across Salinas, CA
Of 74 perennial fruits, nuts, berries, vegetables and herbs, 54 come through the winter in zone 8b and only 24 in zone 10b. That is a different garden at each end of the same metro.
| Zone | ZIPs | Survive | Fail for being too warm |
|---|---|---|---|
| 8b | 1 | 54 of 74 | 11 |
| 9a | 6 | 46 of 74 | 25 |
| 9b | 13 | 40 of 74 | 32 |
| 10a | 9 | 25 of 74 | 49 |
| 10b | 1 | 24 of 74 | 50 |
The last column is the counterintuitive one, and it is why the totals do not simply rise as the winters get milder. Most temperate fruit needs a documented number of hours below about 45 °F to break dormancy and set a crop, so an apple fails in a winter that is too warm; currants and rhubarb cook in the summer heat that comes with it. See the full list with reasons.
At least one station here freezes across the new year, which puts the two ends of a spread on opposite sides of the calendar. Drawing it would produce a bar spanning almost the whole year and meaning nothing, so none is drawn.
The 13 stations behind these numbers
All 13 NOAA stations whose normals this page quotes, spanning about 138 km north to south. Every one is named with its identifier in the station list below — this page does not single one out, because no one station speaks for a whole metro area.
A relative sketch, not a map with a projection: longitude is adjusted for latitude so the shape is not stretched, and there is no basemap. For the one station nearest a specific address, with its real distance, use the ZIP lookup above.
Every figure above comes from these, and each is named so you can check it. Which station serves a given ZIP code, and how far away it is, varies across the metro — the table below gives it per ZIP code rather than this page averaging it.
| Station | NOAA ID | Last spring freeze | First fall freeze | Season |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Big Sur Stn, CA | USC00040790 | February 13 | December 27 | 323 days |
| Carmel Valley, CA | USC00041534 | February 20 | December 8 | 294 days |
| Coalinga, CA | USC00041864 | February 14 | November 30 | 292 days |
| Hearst Castle, CA | USC00043882 | February 13 | February 1 | 365 days |
| King City, CA | USC00044555 | February 23 | November 22 | 271 days |
| Monterey Peninsul AP, CA | USW00023259 | January 2 | December 23 | 363 days |
| Monterey, CA | USC00045795 | January 1 | December 30 | 365 days |
| Paicines 4 W, CA | USC00046610 | April 14 | November 2 | 201 days |
| Pinnacles Nm, CA | USC00046926 | April 23 | November 3 | 189 days |
| Priest Valley, CA | USC00047150 | May 8 | October 22 | 165 days |
| Salinas #2, CA | USC00047668 | February 4 | December 6 | 311 days |
| Salinas Municipal AP, CA | USW00023233 | January 29 | December 10 | 325 days |
| Watsonville Wtr Wks, CA | USC00049473 | January 28 | December 13 | 324 days |
These are medians, not averages — NOAA publishes freeze dates as a probability distribution, and half of years freeze later than the date shown.
Every ZIP code in Salinas, CA
Zones are published per ZIP code, not per metro area, so this is the exact answer rather than the metro area's average. The station column is the nearest one to that ZIP code's centroid and how far away it is — the same figure the tools use, shown here so you can see which ZIP codes are well covered and which are reaching.
| ZIP code | USDA zone | Nearest NOAA station | Distance |
|---|---|---|---|
| 93426 | 9a | Hearst Castle, CA | 24.6 km |
| 93450 | 9a | Priest Valley, CA | 15.9 km |
| 93451 | 8b | Coalinga, CA | 28.9 km |
| 93901 | 9b | Salinas Municipal AP, CA | 2.6 km |
| 93905 | 9b | Salinas Municipal AP, CA | 2.4 km |
| 93906 | 9b | Salinas Municipal AP, CA | 7.0 km |
| 93907 | 9b | Salinas #2, CA | 11.9 km |
| 93908 | 9b | Salinas Municipal AP, CA | 4.2 km |
| 93920 | 10b | Big Sur Stn, CA | 32.2 km |
| 93921 | 10a | Monterey, CA | 4.3 km |
| 93923 | 10a | Carmel Valley, CA | 10.5 km |
| 93924 | 9b | Carmel Valley, CA | 10.6 km |
| 93925 | 9b | Paicines 4 W, CA | 14.8 km |
| 93926 | 9b | Pinnacles Nm, CA | 19.8 km |
| 93927 | 9b | King City, CA | 24.0 km |
| 93928 | 9a | King City, CA | 32.9 km |
| 93930 | 9a | King City, CA | 5.0 km |
| 93932 | 9a | King City, CA | 25.0 km |
| 93933 | 10a | Salinas #2, CA | 10.4 km |
| 93940 | 10a | Monterey Peninsul AP, CA | 4.6 km |
| 93944 | 10a | Monterey, CA | 1.6 km |
| 93950 | 10a | Monterey, CA | 3.7 km |
| 93953 | 10a | Monterey, CA | 3.5 km |
| 93954 | 9a | Priest Valley, CA | 18.7 km |
| 93955 | 10a | Monterey Peninsul AP, CA | 5.9 km |
| 93960 | 9b | Pinnacles Nm, CA | 15.2 km |
| 93962 | 9b | Salinas #2, CA | 4.2 km |
| 95004 | 9b | Watsonville Wtr Wks, CA | 13.8 km |
| 95012 | 9b | Salinas #2, CA | 15.6 km |
| 95039 | 10a | Watsonville Wtr Wks, CA | 11.5 km |
ZIP-code positions are area centroids, so a large rural ZIP code's listed distance is measured from the middle of its area rather than from any particular address in it.
Your own ZIP
Work out your own dates
Each of these takes a ZIP code and answers for that ZIP alone, citing the station it used and how far away it is. There is a ZIP box in the header of every page.
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What survives my winter?
Runs on the hardiness zone, so it answers for all of Salinas, CA at once — zone across 74 perennial fruits, berries, vegetables and herbs.
- When do I start my seeds?
Dates every spring job from your own last freeze — sow indoors, set out, direct sow.
- When do I sow the next round?
How often each crop is worth re-sowing, and when the next sowing is due.
- What can I still plant?
Counts the growing days left before your first fall freeze, crop by crop.
Other places to compare
Gardening in California — zones 5b– 11a covers the whole state: how its 1,788 ZIP codes divide between 12 hardiness zones, and the freeze dates across every NOAA station in it.
Other metro areas in CA:
- Oxnard-Thousand Oaks-Ventura, CA Zones 7b, 8b, 9b, 10a, 10b
- Stockton-Lodi, CA Zone 9b
- Modesto, CA Zone 9b
- Redding, CA Zones 7a, 7b, 8b, 9a, 9b
- Santa Maria-Santa Barbara, CA Zones 9a–10b
- San Luis Obispo-Paso Robles, CA Zones 8b–10a
- Yuba City, CA Zones 9a–9b
- Chico, CA Zones 8b–9b
- Merced, CA Zones 9a–9b
- Santa Cruz-Watsonville, CA Zones 9a–10a
- El Centro, CA Zones 9b–10a
- Vallejo, CA Zone 9b
Gear
If you want to act on this
Each link opens an Amazon search rather than a product we picked. We have not tested these and do not rank them — the search is the honest version, and you choose.
- Soaker hose and drip kitsThe stations here publish no ordinary freeze window, so frost is not what limits the season — water is, through a summer that does not stop.
As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. That costs you nothing extra, and it buys no influence over anything on this site: the dates come from NOAA normals and the zones from the USDA, and no product affects either.
Sources
Where these numbers come from
The hardiness zone is the USDA 2023 Plant Hardiness Zone Map, published per ZIP code by PRISM at Oregon State. The freeze dates are NOAA's 1991–2020 Climate Normals, read from every station whose normals cover a ZIP code in this metro. Nothing here is estimated, and no station stands in for another.
This page names no single station on purpose. Picking one to represent a metro sounds reasonable and is not: the station serving the most ZIP codes is an artifact of where ZIP centroids happen to fall, and it selects a lock on the Monongahela for Pittsburgh and a far southern suburb for Chicago. A range across every station is true; a single cited date for a whole metro is not.