Most Widespread Frost So Far This Autumn In Vermont, Which Is REALLY NOT Saying Much

A ripe, ready to pick tomato in my St. Albans, Vermont
garden today. I picked more than half a dozen 
tomatoes just last Friday. Before this year, the latest
I ever picked a good, not frost-damaged tomato
was on October 1. 

 The National Weather Service has issued a frost advisory for large swaths of Vermont overnight and early Tuesday morning, the most widespread such alert yet this autumn.  

Which is wild, because the frost advisory is saying much, at least compared to an average autumn.

 Most of the Green Mountain State away from Lake Champlain should have had a killing freeze by now, if things were normal. But even as the trees go bare in preparation for winter, sensitive plants outdoors are still untouched, and in some cases thriving. 

The frost advisory, in effect from 2 to 8 a.m. Tuesday, covers central, eastern and southern Vermont. The Northeast Kingdom is exempt from the frost advisory, since their potential growing season is considered over.

However, most of that area of Vermont has very oddly not had a frost yet, so people are still probably hanging in there with sensitive outdoor plants in normally chilly towns like St. Johnsbury, Lyndonville and even sections of normally frigid Island Pond near the lake. 

Even in the Northeast Kingdom, it might be worth it to try to protect plants for a little while.

A frost advisory means temperatures could dip into the low and mid 30s, enough for patchy frost to develop. It doesn't have to get down to 32 degrees to get a frost, because temperatures on the ground are often colder than five feet off the surface, where temperature readings are usually taken.

A frost advisory isn't as dire as a freeze warning, which means temperatures are expected to get below 32 degrees and would really kill off outdoor plants. 

A freeze warning is NOT in the cards for tonight.

The first fall freeze of 2023 is already later than normal for almost all of Vermont.  Depending upon which central Vermont community you live in, on average you should have had the first 32 degree reading of the season sometime in the last week of September or the first couple days in October.

Burlington's average first autumn freeze is around October 8, so we're a little past that. Right along Lake Champlain, in places like South Hero, the average first freeze is around October 19.

It also looks like today's high temperature in Burlington will be below 60 degrees, the first time that's happened since May 17, when we had that unfortunate, and destructive late crop killing freeze.

I don't have specific record on this, but I'm pretty sure this is one of the latest if not THE latest first sub-60 high temperature on record. I've often seen highs in the 40s this time of year, so it has been consistently mild or warm, or even hot for early to mid autumn. 

To give you an idea of how cold it can be this time of year, at least in the past, on this date in 1979, the HIGH temperature in Burlington was 37 degrees, and we had 1.4 inches of snow that day. 

There might be more areas of frost Thursday night and Friday morning, but we still don't see evidence of a hard autumn freeze coming up anytime soon. Temperatures in Vermont should remain seasonably cool, but not at all unusually chilly for at least the next week.