Frost free?

Absorbing the latest news from the Weather Channel website that we can expect some more very cold weather this week, I decided to check on the frost-free dates for my area.

I've done this before, of course. I probably do it every year around this time, but I can never remember for sure what the dates are, so I checked again.

Average frost-free dates for our area vary according to exactly where you are. Some come as early as the middle of this month. Mine is a bit later than that.

If you go to the Dave's Garden website and enter your zip code, you can get information about your own frost-free dates. That's what I did, and I found that the risk of frost here remains until February 27. That's an average, of course, and there's no guarantee that a freeze won't happen after that date, but the odds after February 27 are definitely in my favor.

For my zip code the risk of frost lasts from November 24 through February 27. We can pretty much count on having frost from December 17 through February 6, and we are almost guaranteed not to have frost from March 20 through November 1. My frost-free growing season is around 270 days. In other words, my growing season lasts about 74% of the year, so what have I got to complain about?

Meantime, I'm trying to take advantage of the beautiful - but windy - weather today to get some more plants moved into new beds and reminding myself that it is only 20 more days until that magical frost-free date.