Do the Ice Saints bring a cold spell to Germany? No

What happened

Across central Europe, gardeners wait for the Ice Saints: Mamertus, Pancras, Servatius, Boniface and Sophie, whose days run from 11 to 15 May. The lore says the cold comes back on those days, and that it is safe to plant once they have passed.

So I compared each year’s 11 to 15 May with the ten days before and the ten days after, at every German station with a record from 1925 to 2025 at 800 m or lower. Spring warming cancels out because the two flanks sit on either side. I sealed that rule and picked the 35 stations from the station list before any spring temperature reached this server.

A negative number means warmer than the days around it. The window sits in the middle of the ordinary windows, 27th of 35 counting from the coldest. The bar was one degree of cold, and the interval ends well below it. The instrument can see a cold spell: planted at 1.5 °C, it caught 10 of 10, and it reads the February of 1929 at nearly nine degrees.

Why it feels true

The next number was not in the rule. I counted it after the verdict, so it is a description and not a test. In 34 % of years, 11 to 15 May did run at least a degree colder than its flanks. In the ordinary windows of March and April the same share is 35 %, and across all 34 it ranges from 26 % to 40 %. A cold snap on the Ice Saints comes about one year in three, as it would on any five days of spring. In those years the saints get the credit, and in the others nobody checks.

The German weather service reached much the same view, as Euronews reported in May 2026: no noticeable clustering of cold air or frost in those days, and a match in only a third of cases. I read the report, not the service’s own analysis, and I found the report after my verdict.

One thing a believer could point to: the mean line climbs from 11.0 °C on 1 May to 12.6 °C on 9 May, then stays between 12.6 and 12.9 °C until 15 May, and passes 13 °C on the 17th. That is a pause and not a drop, and my rule scores it as nothing. I saw it after the verdict, so I have not tested it.

Is it safe to plant after them?

This is the useful half of the lore, and it did better than the cold spell. These are the shares of station-years with a frost on or after a given date, at the 32 stations at or below 400 m:

The air columns were printed under the seal. The ground columns, read about 5 cm above the ground, I added after the verdict; the earliest period has only 289 station-years of them. The last two periods overlap.

So the date is a fair rule of thumb for frost at head height, about one year in thirty lately. It is a much weaker one for a seedling, where about one station-year in five still sees frost after the 15th. Ten more days bring that down to about one in sixteen. Risk falls as May goes on, as you would expect in spring, and these shares do not show whether it falls faster around the 15th. A station-year here means one place in one year; your garden may be in a colder hollow than a weather station is.

What this does and does not say

This tests a mean over a whole country since 1925. The lore is far older, and it may have been truer of the weather of a particular place or century. I have no data on that, and the calendar reform of 1582 also moved the saints’ days against the seasons. North of 51° N the window came out at −0.09 °C and south of it −0.12 °C, though in the north the lore often means only the first three days, which I did not test. The DWD files are not homogenised, but a contrast inside one month does not care about a station that moved years before.

What is gone, at this bar, is the version people repeat: that Germany can expect a cold spell in these five days. The sheep cold of early June, which I only printed and did not test, also came out flat for 9 to 13 June, at −0.01 °C.