One easy trick I stumbled upon was to build the simple teepee with wire or tomato cages or anything you have on hand and then drape a tarp (plastic or fabricc)over the teepee and extend it out in all directions away from the plant. If you have bushes or small trees in a row and really big tarp just drape it up and over what you can and then lay the rest of it flat against the ground. The soil will give off heat at night and the heat will collect in the tents made by the small trees. There can still be some frost damage where the leaves touch the plastic but it is amazing how much green you can save.

California has a million micro-climates. SF Peninsula where i live can vary 15-20 degrees based on if you are in the path of the incoming fog. My particular city (our motto is Climate Best by Government Test) is pretty much optimal - not as much fog as up north but not too hot in the summer, we haven't seen frost in 3 years but still get enough chill hours for peaches and plums. My neighbor to the right grows bananas and has a mango tree (no fruit yet) and the other neighbor grows cherries. Zone 9b, Sunset 16 - its gardening paradise. It will cost you big bucks to live here, though, especially with enough land for fruit trees.

Frank: There is no place east of the rockies that even comes close in my opinion. Ya I'm in a good place...for a greenhouse. But compared to CA, well there's no comparison. When I lived in Amarillo I often said that we get more bad weather in April than CA gets all year. Most years that was certainly true. Around lake MI you are looking at a 4 month shorter growing season and what you have is not nearly as good as CA. What I loved about CA is you had a long dry warm summer season that was ideal for ripening high quality fruit. Then you had a mild winter with some rain where everything greened up. It was like another summer only better in many ways than the real summer. You harvested citrus and many other fruits and harvested your cool season vegetables. I harvested sweet peas all winter just for an example. Around here all winter is good for is wind and drought. My peas, the one year I tried them were froze out in early November.

Dan I don't know that I believe anything except that agribusiness refuses to thoroughly test and release the results of those tests to the public, and others are raising grave concerns. I'm only "arguing" that agribusiness has NOT tested its products to alleviate or disprove the alarms raised by people, legit or not. We simply don't know what the truth is, but we certainly know about the research and observations made by non-agribusiness agencies, including large numbers of scientists in the field. Though I think you don't disagree with that. But without the truth, how can we possibly know what are illogical or fallacious or rhetorical alarms? The state of public consciousness could certainly be be educated by testing and transparency, and I don't CARE if those alarms are illogical, fallacious, or rhetorical. I don't think those conclusions are up to me or anybody else not involved in agribusiness. That is THEIR responsibility. What I DO care about is the refusal of agribusiness to provide sufficient information to prove or disprove those alarms. That's MY point, not to explore or denigrate the alarms for veracity, etc. There are so many of them and some have existed for so long that agribusiness is being extremely irresponsible for not addressing them.