Planting and garden beds in Cumberland, Maine.

Foreside beds benefit from the bay's moderating effect, but many of those lots sit on banks that the town plan describes as rising sharply from the water, so wind and exposure matter as much as temperature. Inland at the Center and out in West Cumberland, beds are planned around the colder rating and a later spring.

The soil also varies. The town's mapping shows excessively drained ground concentrated in the northwest corner, where beds dry out quickly and need more organic matter and mulch to hold moisture, while very poorly drained soils line the streams, where plants that tolerate wet feet do better than the usual foundation shrubs.

Much of Cumberland's farmland soil is still classed by USDA as prime farmland or farmland of statewide importance, according to the plan, though a good deal of it now sits under woods and houses. Where a bed is dug into that kind of old field loam, it needs less amendment than a bed dug into builder fill or subsoil left by grading.