Hi,
Gardenz if you read this, you are most likely to have this bec you are the Internet maven. [flatter, flatter].
There should be a site which records the date of the last frost for the last several years by region. This would be most useful, Does anyone know of such?

Thanks,
ellen

Hi,

Well, I'm no Gardenz, but this might help enough.

http://www.victoryseeds.com/frost/index.html

This site claims to list the dates of a 10% chance of frost. Some folks call this date (or thereabouts) the "Frost Free" date. I recently checked our county's Soil Survey and it had a table in the back listing the same date for a 10% chance.

It is my understanding that the average last frost date lets you know when you have a 50% chance of frost. Personally, I don't like those odds. We also have a long growing season here, so I can afford to be patient. If I would have put my tomato seedlings out one or two weeks after the average last frost date (which here in Sacramento is the middle of February or so), they would have drowned and been blown to bits by the recent storms.

Here, too, are two charts to help you figure out when to start seeds indoors to set plants out at the right time:

http://vric.ucdavis.edu/veginfo/commodity/garden/springseedschedule.pdf

http://vric.ucdavis.edu/veginfo/commodity/garden/fallseedschedule.pdf

Frost date? What frost date? (heh heh heh)

This is a web site in Ga. I go to
It is sponsered by th University System of Georgia. New Jersery shouls have one too. Just gotta do some research.

http://www.griffin.peachnet.edu/bae/
then i go to my city and find out the Historical data for the past years . Pretty neat

http://www.wunderground.com

Well, it doesn't have a little frost dates chart, but it does have local historical data (including area record high/low graphs, rainfall, etc...) that is accessed by your zip code. (I can look at my data and see that mid-March will work if I am willing to gamble, and the local saying the weekend after Good Friday is pretty on-target if I want to be sure of no frost.) It also has moon phase info, and links to NOAA, UV forecasts, air quality maps, heat indices, windchill, wind, snow, and jet stream maps. Plus NEXRAD for local & regoinal areas. (And a LOT more.) It is my favorite weather site. Beats the tar outta weather.com.

~~~~~Plus, for any other ex-military meteorology troops out there, there is an option to display local observations in METAR!!!

Ellenr!!! Boy, when you throw down the gauntlet...you throw down the gauntlet!!!

Just saw your post this afternoon, and this is the best I could come up with. The stuff about New Jersey, I had on file, but the other...I hunted around for:

Frost/Free historical data (nationwide) is only available through the National Climate Data Center (through NOAA). Until recently, it could be accessed online. [u]Unfortunately[/u] due to revenue problems , they're now charging for certain reports, and the frost/free historical data is one of those. They want $20 for it! :O
http://www5.ncdc.noaa.gov/pubs/publications.html

For whatever good this will do you, it give you the possibilities of frost throughout the nation:
http://lwf.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/documentlibrary/freezefrost/frostfreemaps.html

There's two other possibilities I can suggest:
(1) Get in touch with either your local extension service and see if they have records of past years' last frost dates. Or contact Cook Agricultural College at Rutgers University and ask them the same.

(2) Since you're a sister NewJerseyite, ellenr, I figured you're only interested in Jersey frost free dates. So, the closest I could come was this climate observational site from Rutgers. Doesn't give last frost dates, but if you click on "Monthly Temperature and Precipitation" then type in the year, month and extreme or miminum temperature (all from drop down menus) you could AT LEAST find out what say.... what the lowest temp was in April of 2001, for instance.
http://climate.rutgers.edu/stateclim/njclimdata.html

As I said, not exactly what you're looking for. The best case scenario would be if they listed the DAY in April the temps reached that low. Could give you pretty good indication that there was a frost or freeze that day.
This is the closest I could come to highs and lows, "city-specific" in New Jersey: http://climate.rutgers.edu/stateclim/dailynormalsextremes.html
Choose city and year and you'll get a monthly listing of highest and lowest temps each day for a particular month.

Hope you at least enjoy bopping around on the sites, een if it doesn't provide you with the exact info you wanted.

gardenz

You could also ask a local garden nut. I have been keeping track of first/last frosts since I moved here, although first frosts are easier to note ("Oh my G-d, the tomatoes") than last ones, which just seem to kind of slip past me.

Indeed, Gardendmpls. Probably the simplest of all solutions.

gardenz