Bruce I wish you good luck in your experiments. I see you are in zone 8 and I am considerably colder here in zone 6, but I might give you a little unsolicited advice about the peppers if you don't mind? Peppers are sensitive to the cold. One year, I planted too early, and a freezing night was forecast. The plants were still small enough I could cover them with wide-mouth quart glass jars and a blanket over that. They lived through it and I thought I dodged the bullet. But when everyone I knew was complaining about having so many peppers they couldn't keep up with them, I had only one or two small peppers on each bush. The plants lived through to the fall, but still not much to harvest. Since then, I've been very careful not to set out my peppers until early May, which is when I plant my sweet potato slips. Normally, my peppers don't yield much through the heat of the summer, and the heat wilts the plant every afternoon. But as long as I keep enough water on the plants, they make it to fall and then they go crazy. I shared my sweet cheese peppers last year with three of my neighbors. We all got enough to freeze for this winter and maybe the next. My jalapeno's, I shared with one other neighbor, and he and I canned up a lot of nacho-style pepper rings. I made enough of those that I could share the finished product with another neighbor, who doesn't can. I think most of us miss getting our hands in the dirt through the long winter months, I admit I'm looking forward to getting my little plants started. Another summer, another adventure, on the way!

OMG Camp, I can see this graphically in detail. Bummer. Bamboo broke my opal, not my teeth. Wintertime is not a time for me to staY inside. We have a different kind of winter. No bugs and no snakes and no 100º+ so heavy garden chores are much more pleasant. It is time to do my woods restoration.. That means chainsawing thinning out of control Mountain ash Juniper. Creation of slash berms on slopes, wildlife piles, protect young red oak, madrone and escarpment cherry trees. clean out catalog nests in bird boxes. take photos and create a long report for the county to keep my tax exempt. I have been working on it for 4 days. Tomorrow I need to complete the report and get it to my overlords. I live in fear till it is done. I did get some seeds planted the other day.

Great idea for a new discussion - you may want to post on another forum (perhaps Trees and/or Perennials) where there is more activity.

I do something similar, now in a much smaller garden than I've had until I moved. I grow only winter lettuces under a small tent, first with row covers, then with plastic. And I'm usually able to keep savoy cabbages under just double row cover into February. Until climate change changed everything, we were a zone 5A, now usually nearly zone 7. But the coming deep cold this Christmas weekend will really test my overwintering abilities. I tucked a multilayered row cover over the lettuces (they're planted tightly in an area roughly 4x4, and put down a thick layer of hay over that. Then the plastic over the hoops to keep today's rain out. For the cabbages I stuffed hay around them and over top, covered with a double row cover and placed tarps over that to keep the hay dry. Temps going to zero or around that for several nights. I know that the savoys have survived about 7 or 8 degrees with just double row cover, but we'll see how they come through this cold. Too bad we won't have snow since that's such a good insulator.