We offer garden consulting in Lawrenceville, Allegheny County — $85–$130 for an in-person visit that produces a hand-drawn layout, written plant list, and regional timing guide for your last frost zone. Relatively flat near the Allegheny River along Butler Street; the residential streets behind climb hillsides toward Stanton Heights. Every Lawrenceville property has its own set of constraints, and the plan we put together reflects them.
A lot of vegetable gardening content is written for climates that are nothing like ours. Here in western Pennsylvania, our last frost date is typically May 1 to 10 around Pittsburgh — that's later than most of the country, and it compresses the warm-season growing window considerably. Tomatoes and peppers go in after that date. Raised beds help because they warm up two to three weeks faster than in-ground soil in spring, which can genuinely extend your season at this latitude. Across the service territory, conditions vary meaningfully: the WV panhandle runs similar to Pittsburgh — zone 6a to 6b — while central Ohio typically sees its last frost around April 25 to May 5. Move into central Indiana and you're looking at April 15 to 25; southern Indiana can be as early as April 5 to 15, which opens the door to warmer-season crops with a longer run. What thrives in zone 6 with minimal struggle: tomatoes (with the right variety timing), winter squash, beans, kale, garlic. What you'll fight every year: melons unless conditions cooperate. We also connect customers who want to grow their own food with our community plant pickup program, where you can source transplants ready to go in the ground at exactly the right time for this region.
For Lawrenceville specifically: highly urban; fill and construction debris common in a neighborhood that has seen waves of construction and demolition. The gentrification boom of the 2010s brought significant soil disturbance from rowhouse renovations. Rear yards often have poor soil quality requiring significant amendment for productive gardening.
A standard consultation includes the full site visit — sun assessment, drainage review, soil evaluation — plus a hand-drawn layout sketch, a plant list matched to your specific conditions and goals, a timing guide for your last frost zone, and soil amendment recommendations. If you're building raised beds, we walk through what to fill them with. The session runs about an hour and a half to two hours on site, and we cover everything you need to actually put a garden in the ground with confidence.
Before: you want to grow your own food. Maybe you've thought about it for years, or tried it once and it didn't go well. You have a yard, some ambition, and a lot of unanswered questions — where exactly to put beds, what soil to use, what will realistically grow in your conditions, and when to plant what. During: we come out, walk the site with you, map the sun, talk through what you want to grow and what your yard can support. We sketch a layout on paper, put together a plant list with varieties suited to this region, and work through the timing so you know what to start in late winter, what goes in the ground in early spring, and what has to wait until after last frost. We talk soil mix if you're doing raised beds — roughly equal parts compost, topsoil, and perlite or vermiculite for drainage and air. After: you have a paper sketch of your garden, a written plant list, timing notes, and soil recommendations. You have a plan you can hand to someone at the garden center and actually execute. And if questions come up six weeks in, a follow-up visit is available.
An initial garden consultation — site visit, sun assessment, layout sketch, plant list, and timing guide — runs $85 to $130. If you want a full garden plan with a follow-up visit included, that package is $225 to $375 depending on site complexity and plan scope. Remote consultations by phone or video are available at $50 to $75 per hour.
Yes — Garden Soon provides in-person garden consulting in Lawrenceville. We come to your property, walk the site together, and produce a plan specific to your conditions. Call (724) 201-9484 or use the contact form to schedule.
We start by walking the yard together and mapping where direct sun actually falls through the day — that determines where beds can go and what will produce well. Relatively flat near the Allegheny River along Butler Street; the residential streets behind climb hillsides toward Stanton Heights. From there we sketch a layout on paper during the visit and put together a written plant list matched to your conditions and what you want to grow in Lawrenceville.
Winter is actually a great time to schedule, because planning ahead of the season is more useful than trying to catch up once things are in the ground. We can walk a site in November, December, or January — the sun angle is different but that's actually useful information — and build a full planting plan and soil prep schedule so you're ready to act the moment the ground is workable in March. Remote consultations by phone or video are also available in winter at $50 to $75 per hour for customers who want to plan from wherever they are.
The main difference is that we're looking at your site, not a general situation. A YouTube video can explain what raised beds are and why they work; it cannot tell you that the south-facing wall of your house actually gets cut off by tree shade by 1pm, which changes everything about where your beds should go. Most online gardening content is also written for zone 7 or 8, or averaged across the whole country, which means the frost dates, timing, and crop recommendations are wrong for zone 6 in western Pennsylvania or Ohio. We answer the site-specific questions that general content can't.
Yes — and in zone 6, there's more season to work with than most people assume. Cool-season crops like lettuce, spinach, kale, peas, and radishes can go in the ground four to six weeks before last frost, which in western Pennsylvania means starting in March. With succession planting — putting in a short row of lettuce every two weeks rather than all at once — you can have continuous harvests rather than a single glut. In fall, many of those same crops can go back in after summer heat breaks, and cold frames or row cover can push the harvest window into November and beyond.
Customers who do a garden consultation in Lawrenceville often connect with these other services:
Garden Soon
Licensed & insured in PA · Rated 4.8★ on Google
Providing Vegetable Garden Design in Lawrenceville, PA and surrounding areas.