I'm in Tupelo MS which I think is near your latitude and we have definitely had frost around mid-April. So the date is the Average last frost date, meaning you can still get your last frost before or after that date. I don't think we ever got it after April 15 (lived here 8 yrs only). It's a crap shoot. I guess look at March 31 and then check the 10 day forecast????

I'm just north of Athens. It's a crapshoot every year. Anytime during the month of April.

This is THE authoritative source for averages and probabilities of first and last frost dates for a number of places in every state. Used to be a big scanned image of all the pages. Now they have them scanned in with text recognition, so they're easier to read. They're not all complete, but complete enough that it is still quite a resource.

Athens:
90% chance that you could hit 32 on March 9.
50% chance that you could hit 32 on March 24.
10% chance that you could hit 32 on April 8.

Based on data from 1971 to 2000.

Here is a link that might be useful: NOAA Climatology data

This post was edited by chrisb_sc_z7 on Tue, Jan 14, 14 at 13:41

Ok - thanks so much for the input.

The weather is so wacky that crap shoot is a great way to describe it... I'm starting my tom & pepper seeds indoors the second week of February and we'll see how it goes!