Jordanz, you really aren't getting much cold. I suggest that you fill some used milk cartons with water and set them with the veggies to absorb heat all day. Then at night, you cover everything with a sheet of plastic or a tarp. The milk jugs and the soil will give off a bit of stored heat and the tarp will keep it in. The tarp also keeps the frost off the leaves. Remove the cover in the morning. It's cold here and I can usually get several more weeks for my tomato plants just by covering them at night. Your carrots should be OK with no protection at your temperatures. Probably the peas, too.

If you cut off the new shoots, not the canes, there would be no need to seal. Rotting frozen shoots can become the site of Botrytis infections on the cane; stripping or cutting them off flush would probably help the rose heal quicker. You might consider doing this on the plants that are prone to creeping black crud on the green canes, if you've identified any of those. Old barky canes seem resistant. I get frozen shoots every March, and I strip them only if I feel like it. I'm so sorry you've lost part of your short growing season. At least you'll have some early bloom from the hardy ones.

I agree with A. I wouldn't worry in zone 7 about those grasses. Miscanthus and Panicums resp[ond to two things, light and warmth. As soon as they get those, you'll see them popping up nice new growth! I'd also be real surprised if your Hameln doesn't make it. There's lots of energy under the gorund in those zone 7 grasses. Mother Nature sure did have some fun this week. We actually had ice sitting in our Sago palms 2 inches deep Sunday morning. Unheard of here in my area...especially on Easter!

I agree that there's so much diversity in roses that using one rule to decide for them isn't necessarily a sure thing. I'm in a totally different zone of course, but the rule of thumb to wait till the forsythia blooms is a good general benchmark for rose newbies that keeps most itchy fingers from doing too much damage. As an experienced rose grower, I let the rose tell me if it's ready to be pruned or not. Our forsythia tends to bloom in late March or even early April, and our last frost date is late April/early May, but I usually start pruning some roses at the beginning of March. Typically these are the extremely hardy roses like the Explorers that you couldn't hurt with any pruning, and since they're hardy to much colder temperatures they're ready to handle even late freezes whether or not they've leafed out. For the rest of my roses where there isn't a common factor to judge, I have two "tells" that indicate the rose is ready to be pruned: a) the canes are black to the ground and no pruning is going to start any growth whatsoever on that cane (a disturbing majority of my roses, I might add), or b) the leaf buds are thoroughly swollen and ready to pop. In the case of b), the rose is going to leaf out whether or not I prune, so I might as well get the unproductive cane out of the way so it doesn't waste energy trying to resurrect canes that are unhealthy. Yes a late frost might nip some of the growth, but it's going to do that whether or not I prune by that stage, so I might as well get the old canes out of the picture. I don't do any "shaping" pruning at this stage BTW, which might be more of what you do in warmer zones, and I usually wait till well past last frost for that. There are variants on this method if I get itchy fingers before I see a convincing case of leaf swell. I do a "pre-prune" to cut most of the damaged canes off without yet cutting into healthy cane. That is also a depressing number of the canes in my zone, and since I always have to do a second or third round of cleanup later in spring/summer for canes that looked healthy but weren't, this doesn't add much extra work. It also neatens up the garden for bulb season and lets me take advantage of the nice weather before spring planting is advised. I like this system since it gets me up close and personal with each rose and I start to learn their quirks and habits. Some roses are notoriously late to leaf out, and I learn not to mess with them at all beyond some pre-pruning and encouraging whispering now and then. I don't know if pruning would follow substantially different rules in your climate, but my suggestion is to build your own set of "tells" for your zone rather than trying to time it too much with the weather. As our weather gets more unpredictable, there will be more adverse events to work around. Watching the roses over the years will let you know which ones are more susceptible to that variation. Cynthia