Can't say it any clearer. ;) None of the listed crops require any special care or concern. All are very cold, even frost, even snow tolerant. Even when full grown. All of the root crops can, in fact, be left in the ground in the winter and harvested as need and spring green peas keep right on trucking even if it snows on them. The only time you have to be concerned about them is if the ground itself freezes and it takes days of a deep, hard freeze to to that. Dave

Dry mulch or as dry as you can get, such as leaves with a cover to keep them from blowing away such as the packing material that comes in rolls and looks like opaque plastic is a good cover which will not have to be removed. The same process with the porous row white row cover used for veg will work. This process can be used to forestall emergence and get ahead of the spring freeze curve. I'm saying cover in Feb or Mar when it is still cold and leave it on as long as you can. Of course all this won't allow early eye counting that we all enjoy but it is not good for the hosta. How many go out and remove mulch to see if things are coming up?

tamparookie, Hey, we are neighbors! I am just East of you in Forest Hills. Our forecast has become considerably better than it was this morning. We were supposed to hit 31. Now it's more like 36. I can deal with that. 36 will not damage a lot more plants than 31 will. Also, this area of town seems to escape the worst low temperatures because there are so many lakes around here. I think you'll be fine tonight. Tomorrow may present more problems, as the wind will be greatly diminished, and we will probably get frost. I hardly have any plants that die above freezing. I am shortly going out to water some things, to prevent as much suffering as I can. My veggie crop got a late start this year. And so far, this has been a bad year for a late veggie start. Coldest November in a few years at least. My tomatoes were just starting to really get going. I'll do what I can and call it a night. Natural Selection!!!

I got down to 25 last nite, and everything came thru with flying colors! A few of the things that prefer cold look BETTER than they did before! The wind made it a little bit chilly, but I was out in the yard doing some miscellaneous things today anyway. Tomorrow is supposed to be beautiful--then cooler again, with "possibilities" of precip! I'm not buying it!!! Kat, if your yard is sloped, seriously consider doing some sort of terracing to level the soil. Watering on a slope--even a gentle one--is really hard. At the swap try to remember to have a look at my Escape-Proof Garden! It's less than 2' wide, but it's sloped--doesn't really look like it should be much of a problem, but it was impossible to water until I half buried some 2 X 4 pieces here and there to keep the water from immediately running off. In this case the area isn't visible from the yard, and you wouldn't want to do that, but maybe a couple railroad ties or bricks or something--depending on the degree of the slope. I had tried using bark mulch to make it easier to water, but it turned out that the mulch just kept washing down to the bottom--and a lot of water was wasted in trying to get the plants watered deeply enough to grow well! And it'll be a lot easier to do some sort of terracing now than it would be after you've started putting plants in. Just something to think about. Skybird