St. Joseph, TN 38481 Frost Dates
38481, near St. Joseph, TN: the frost window
Around 03/29 is the usual last spring frost, about 213 days away. Fall's first freeze usually shows up around 11/04, roughly 219 days after the last spring frost.
Zone 7b (5 to 10°F average annual minimum) comes from the USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Map; the frost dates above are the 1991-2020 normal at the nearest reporting NOAA station for St. Joseph, not a forecast for this year.
Stretching the season past the first frost
St. Joseph's growing season runs out in roughly 10 weeks — a cold frame or greenhouse kit is the usual way to keep cool-weather crops going past the first frost.
The actual range around St. Joseph's last frost
03/29 is the middle of 30 years of NOAA records, not a promise. Getting tender plants in by 03/10 carries real risk, frost has hit that late in about 9 of 10 years here. Wait until 04/15 and only about 1 year in 10 sees frost after that.
St. Joseph against the rest of the dataset
At roughly 219 frost-free days, St. Joseph places 13,077 of 40,283 ZIP codes in this dataset. Within TN, it ranks 155 of 770.
Learn more
Two guides worth reading on 38481: the frost range, on how to read the range around St. Joseph's dates instead of trusting one, and local microclimates, on what one yard in St. Joseph can differ from the 38481 normal.