You'll want to put this one in "Vegetables".

Andie: Not sure where you are in SoCal, but I'm in San Diego. So, my few years gardening experience might help. And Yes --gardening is addictive. Yo be honest with you, if your area gets below freezing(AT ALL), the peppers, tomatoes and cukes just aren't going to survive. Even if they do, they won't THRIVE. Those are WARM weather crops. And they need lots of sun -- something that even the mild winters here just can't supply. Don't get me wrong. If you start those veggies between March and June, you can get nice harvest all the way up until November and December. But STARTING them this late won't yield much of anything. I like to start my peppers and tomatoes in January indoors, under a shoplight with "daylight" flourescent bulbs. Cukes can be started in Feb. or March. Or I just wait until the nurseries bring in transplants around late March. There's actually more veggies that you can grow here in the fall and winter here - lettuces, spinach, root veggies, anything in the brassica family(broccoli,cauliflower,Kale,cabbage, etc.),snow peas, etc. Do a search in google for: vegetable planting guide along with the name of your county. You'll get a general idea on WHAT to grow and WHEN to grow them. You can still get some COOL weather crops in the ground, but you're probably best off finding transplants at Home Depot or (even better) your local nursery. All I saw at MY Home Depot was lettuce. I DID find some broccoli and cauliflower at my Walmart though. Good Luck. Kevin

Glo - Thanks for reassuring me! I hope your move is awesome! My husband has wanted to move us to Colorado for years and hasn't managed to quite convince me yet, although I think it's absolutely wonderful there. LOL So, Winter Solstice is the same everywhere? (LOL)... I guess you're seeing how little I know... Nancy - Thanks for the tip! I am gonna have to watch the lead hand myself as I way oversowed my cantaloupes this fall. The poor babies are fighting each other and giving me 2 to 5 inches fruits that don't look like they're EVER going to full ripen. I will be much more careful in the future. I'll try to not get TOO excited when I go to plant. LOL Carrie - Wow! That's some really good info. That's exactly the kind of thing I was worried about. I'm grateful for the heads up. Liz - LIZ!!! Hey, girl! Fancy meeting you here and there and now here! hee hee... The whole last paragraph of what you wrote is exactly what is concerning me. I know that I personally wear shorts through-out almost the whole winter except for those few crazy days that we see. 50's or what have you is not cold to me... We do get the occasional freeze, but then a week or two later at most you could have a 70+ degree high! All this in the same few days / weeks / months... it's SO crazy! Oh, and if they're having a plantswap around the 8th of December as well, I sure want to know as I'll be out that way. :-) Blessings, Angela

There is a very hardy bromeliad that has green leaves with simple red blooms that doesn't grow more then a foot high. I can't remember the name of it but both my parents and I have decent sized patches of them and I've never seen any frost damage on them even though we live in a cold spot in zone 9a. You could plant something like that and mix some other plants like jungle gold peacock ginger or purple queen in for some extra summer time color. Here's what the brom looks like when not in bloom. If you're interested I can probably bread off a few starts from one of the larger clumps of plants and mail them to you. Here's another tough variety of brom that I unfortuneatly don't know the name of. The trick to finding cold hardy broms seems to be in how serrated the leaf edges are. It seems like the more teeth a plant has the hardier it is! And here's a variety of brom that I think is related to the painted finger nail. These are growing at the base of a large oak and I've never covered them even in the hardest freeze. Jungle gold peacock ginger and another type that again I can't quite remember the name of. I believe that jungle gold is the largest of the peacock gingers but it still doesn't get over a foot tall. Kara