I've got rosemary, oregano, thyme, and mints in pots too. All of mine do fine through the winter (I'm in s.e. Wake Co). I can harvest from rosemary and thyme throughout the winter and a sometimes a little oregano (but I usually just use it dried because it's easier). My mints are in pots sunk in the ground to attempt to contain them and they die back during the winter. I usually keep my pots in a somewhat sheltered spot up against the house to keep them a little warmer. If it gets really cold (teens - low 20's) I throw a floating row cover over them. I'd just dry the sage. It takes up less space that way. And sage holds it's flavor well dried. I save freezer space for basil, cilantro, parsley, and chives.

Leava, I'm supposed to be outside planting, so I'll keep this quick as I munch on my lunch and then head back out to the garden... I especially like drying cherry tomatoes, and by cherry what I really mean is bite-sizes ones because the bite-sized tomatoes come not just in the round cherry shape, but also pear-, grape-, tiny currant- and plum-shaped as well. I cut them in half, put them face-down on a cookie sheet and dehydrate them using the 'Dehydrate' mode in my convection oven. This will be either my 3rd or 4th summer with the convection oven with the built-in dehydration mode and I just love it. It allows me to dehydrate up to six cookie sheets of bite-sized tomatoes at one time, and that's a big time-saver compared to how long it used to take me to do that many with my dehydrator. I fill freezer-type zip-lock bags with the bite-sized tomatoes and store them in the freezer. In the winter after all the fresh tomatoes are gone, we start eating the dried ones. You can thaw them and eat them dry, kind of like raisins if you want. One of our neighbors eats them that way by just tossing a handful of them into her salads. I like to put a handful in a cup of warm water and rehydrate them for a few minutes before eating them. Although their texture is not the same as a fresh-from-the-garden tomato, their flavor is! That's the big thing I dry every year, but I dry other foods when the stove isn't full of tomatoes. Some years I dry peppers. You can dry them whole, or cut/chop them into pieces and dry them. If you get the pieces dry enough, you can grind them into a powder and have your own pepper seasoning. You can dry slices of almost any vegetable. You do have to get their moisture content low enough that they won't mold in storage or store them in the freezer until you use them. One of my favorites dried (and this will sound odd) is cantaloupe and watermelon. They shrivel down to almost nothing, but they are oh-so-sweet. In a good melon year, you cannot eat all the melons fast enough, so dehydrating them allows you to save some for later. You also can preserve melons by pickling (and I'm not crazy about pickled melons but you'll never know if you'll like them until you try them) or by using a melon ball scoop to make melon balls that you then can freeze. If you do that, they have the best texture if you only halfway thaw them before eating. You can dehydrate chopped onions, celery, peppers, carrots, beans or whole peas and use them later on when making soups and stews. You can dehydrate slices of potatoes and use them for cooking later by rehydrating them. Once rehydrated you can use them in various recipes like to make au gratin potatoes, for example, or toss them into homemade soups and stews too. You can dehydrate many fruits, like apples, pears, peaches, plums, etc. Last year, when our peach and plum trees went bonkers and produced tons of fruit, I dehydrated some, froze some, and made tons of fruit butters, jellies, jams and syrups. I never could have dehydrated all the fruit before it went bad because three trees produced over 300 lbs., but drying it was one method to preserve some of the fruit while I was busy canning and freezing (and eating!) the rest. Almost any fruit or veggie can be dehydrated, but you have to have some idea of how you're going to use those later on, or they'll just sit in the freezer or pantry because you haven't figured out what to do with them. I love dried cherries and eat them dried the same way you'd eat raisins or prunes. I've never tried cooking with them, but I'm sure you could rehydrate them and cook with them too. I found an old thread where some of us talked about how we preserve food. Thought you might find something in it that is of interest to you if you haven't already read it. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: Previous Thread

the SW store told me they don't have the LRV for it. OMG, that's retarded. There are two SW Color Specifiers (fandecks). The one that is normally given/sold to paint customers stops at "Energetic Brights". The other fandeck is normally given out to color professionals and is also included in the pro Architectural Color Case. In addition to all the colors in the other fandeck, it includes the "Interior Preservation Palette" and the "Exterior Preservation Palette". Sage SW 2860 is on page #156 of the pro Architectural fandeck in the "Exterior Preservation Palette" section. The LRV of Sage SW 2860 is 43 and it is right on the back of the color strip -- just like all the other SW colors. The Preservation Palettes also have their own fold-out brochures and I'm pretty darn sure the LRV is included there as well. Lastly, the actual colorants in a paint color really don't mean anything. One big thing to keep in mind is that the formula, combo of colorants for the same color can differ from one can of paint base to another. I've mentioned before that colorant information is ultimately meaningless unless you are involved with mixing, shifting the color and understand how one colorant affects the others -- and even then, it's not 100% predictable. You can only speculate. Kinda have to mix the colorants to see what happens. After the fact, after the color is mixed, the list of colorants is truly of no value and in many cases just adds to confusion.

With a good layer of leaves as mulch and not trimming down the the branches until February or March, my pineapple sage returned for 4 years (until I forgot to mulch it and we had an extremely cold winter!) That was in zone 7a with occasional lows down to 9 degrees. It does take them a long time to show life in the spring - sometimes it is juts easier to buy a new one. In years that I've bought a new one after I've given up and of course the next week the old one showed some life, they both end up about the same size and would bloom at the same time. Good luck!