this is boardering on cruel & unusual.............

[herenorthere]

Winter ends long before there are no more frosts.  I'll guess our last significant frost tends to be in late April, but winter is over in March.  Not because of the vernal equinox, but because the beginning of March is more like winter and the end of March is more like Spring.  It can still snow after that, but the life expectancy of a late snow is pretty short after the sun comes out.  But there's no doubt winter hangs on in NE Montana long after it's gone from central CT.

 

[rattler]

and with us that can vary considerably from year to year. we can still get pretty significant frosts the first week of june some years. other years the last hard frost will be the third week in april. its not unusual for us to have snow on the ground from Halloween to the first or second week in may. and thats not counting it melting and snowing again, it means no major bare ground until the first week of May. other years we only have smow on the ground with no major melting from about Christmas till the begining of April. kinda hard to compare one year to another

 

[herenorthere]

Our last frost of spring seems much more regular than the first frost of fall.  I don't know if weather statistics show it, but that's how it seems.

The other critical date, of course, is when the first important seed catalog arrives.  For me, that happened today when the Fedco catalog - http://www.fedcoseeds.com - arrived.  The other significant catalog - http://www.growitalian.com/ - should be here within a day or two.  Both are reliable first week of December catalog mailers.  Spring won't arrive until I've spent enough hours studying seed catalogs and folding pages and circling things.