Find your first and last frost dates

Here's a nice new feature that will be helpful for many people:

http://davesgarden.com/guides/freeze-frost-dates/

Enter your zipcode or location (City, State) and it will tell you when your frost dates are. As far as I know, this is the first application of its type to do this, and I think it'll be helpful for a lot of people.

Unfortunately, this is only for the continental US because that's all the climate data I currently have.

Great!

I just put mine in and it is dead on by my data. This will be a wonderful resource for everyone!

That's neat! Hmmm... Well, except for the last line in the Fall. I think perhaps it's supposed to say December 28th, maybe?

Interesting. That's a bug that I didn't foresee could happen. I'll get to fixing that. It should be coming back in around January 1st.

This will be very nice! It can be such a pain to try to find this information for different areas using the extension service sites.

Thanks, Dave!

Yes, thank you! Very helpful and lots more accurate than anything I found this year.

Except the one bit of info that the oldtimers around here would never plant out tomatoes til all the snow was melted off of Black Butte. Yup. turned out to be dead right, and the timing of last frost in this info confirms that advice. ;-)

A very useful table and formatted beautifully. Better than any I've ever found. Thank you!

Great application Dave! My dates are a bit willy too like Marylyn_TX. Will look for your fix. The dates that are "right" are pretty close to my personal experience!

Kelly

This is what it shows for my area: http://davesgarden.com/guides/freeze-frost-dates/index.php?q=32119&submit=Go and I see a couple of discrepancies, at least I sure hope they're inaccurate, LOL.

SPRINGTIME:
You are almost certainly going to still have frost by MAY 10.

FALSE! UH UH, NO WAY! Should that maybe read MARCH?


FALL:
On average your first frost will arrive @ May 2.

FALSE, by early May our temp's are rarely below 60ºF. If we have frost it would be in January or February.


IT ALSO SAYS:
Your frost-free growing season is @ 80 days.

FALSE, Our frost free growing season should be at least 200 days, if not more.

The chart at the very bottom of this page is more accurate for our first/last frost dates: http://www.climate-charts.com/USA-Stations/FL/FL082158.php

LOL, I've read about global warming and climate changes but I hope this data isn't accurate for my area until I'm gone from this earth. I don't want to ever see frost here in April/May! ^_^








This message was edited Dec 15, 2009 3:15 PM

On the other hand, Dave, I ran my parents' zip and this one looks accurate...

Maybe that will help you in your troubleshooting?

This is very handy info! The dates do appear off for my zip as well...

Cool feature! Looks like maybe it's the warmer climates that it has a little more trouble with? Mine doesn't come out quite right either (tells me I don't have problems with frost), but it's because it chooses cities that are geographically close to me but closer to the Bay and therefore have warmer winters than I do. But when I choose Pleasanton which is the next city over from me it has a similar problem to what others are seeing--the avg first frost date for fall & the length of the frost free growing season are weird (everything else looks OK though)

Springtime:
On average, your last frost will be around January 24.
You are almost certainly going to still have frost by January 7.
You will almost certainly never see a frost after March 1.
Fall:
On average, your first frost will arrive around April 26.
You will almost certainly never see a frost before December 9.
You are almost certainly going to get a frost by January 5.
Your frost-free growing season is around 92 days.

ecrane3 is right. It's the warmer climates. Basically, if there is a spillover between December and January in the frost dates, it gets very confused. I'll get it worked out. :-)

Sounds logical - 85031 (me) is hot and 04736 (parents) is cold...

Thanks for making this new tool for us Dave! Love it!

Love the new tool, Dave! Will be looking forward to the "fix". Except for the problems other warm-climate users have noticed, it looks dead on for me as well.

Looks like I can think about moving tomato planting season up a bit! :)

Edited to add, I missed the temperature/percentage tables the first time I looked. I'm finding them a bit confusing--could you please add a little explanation of what they're telling us? Thanks!

This message was edited Dec 15, 2009 2:58 PM

Neat!

Fun! I checked my current ZIP and my most recent ZIP - both were spot-on with our typical first/last frost dates. Thanks!!!

I did a bit of work on the system (and reworked the wording of the results, as well, to try to make it more readable.)

I'm not 100% certain that I fixed the warm-season bugs, but if ya'll could test it and let me know if you find anything amiss, I'd appreciate it!

Still off a bit for me in zip 32119: http://davesgarden.com/guides/freeze-frost-dates/index.php?q=32119&submit=Go

It's saying we will almost certainly get frost from Feb 4th - May 10th.

This is still amiss for 85031 . . .

Almost certainly, however, you will receive frost from January 2 through September 3.

Rest looks good though.

Thanks plantladylin, that helps. I'll work on this in the morning.

Love the new presentation for the results--mine now looks spot-on!

And thanks for the additional explanation of the temperature charts--I get it now!

That worked much better. Thanks, Dave! :-)

I got an error, Dave. The top of the page had my zip and city listed though so it read my zip code.

Database error: Invalid SQL: select MAKEDATE(2011,)
MySQL Error: 1064 (You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near ')' at line 1)
Session halted.

Kell, could you let me know what zipcode you were entering? (Or, dmail if you don't want it public)

Hmm, dates seem strange to me too

Each winter, on average, your risk of frost is from December 26 through June 1.(that's funny!)

Almost certainly, however, you will receive frost from January 10 through July 7.(highly unlikely!)

You are almost guaranteed that you will not get frost from March 17 through November 18.

Your frost-free growing season is around 208 days. (Should have maybe another 100+ on that number.)