Thank you, everyone for all your opinions. You have given me some new places to consider. I know that, being from California, I probably have a very wrong idea of what winters must be like in places like Michigan, Montana, Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire. I tend to imagine that those places live with 5 feet of snow for 6 months. I tend to think that there would be no way to have a vegetable garden in those places, so if I am wrong about some of those things, please set me straight.