St. Joseph, MO 64501 Frost Dates
St. Joseph, MO: when does the frost end?
Typically, the last spring freeze lands around 04/19, roughly 234 days out. Fall's first freeze usually shows up around 10/17, roughly 180 days after the last spring frost.
Zone 6a (-10 to -5°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
With roughly 7 weeks until St. Joseph's first fall frost, a row cover or cold frame is what stretches the last few weeks of harvest here.
The actual range around St. Joseph's last frost
04/19 is the middle of 30 years of NOAA records, not a promise. Getting tender plants in by 04/05 carries real risk, frost has hit that late in about 9 of 10 years here. Wait until 05/03 and only about 1 year in 10 sees frost after that.
St. Joseph against the rest of the dataset
At roughly 180 frost-free days, St. Joseph places 24,765 of 40,283 ZIP codes in this dataset. Within MO, it ranks 1,007 of 1,129.
Learn more
Before leaning on 64501's figures: local microclimates explains what one yard in St. Joseph can differ from the 64501 normal, while zone vs. frost date explains why Zone 6a and St. Joseph's frost date answer different questions.