I put up an unheated plastic hoop greenhouse just before our first freeze last November. (I'm on the Virginia coast.) I had just moved to a house and brought with me dozens of struggling vegetables in pots that I was trying to grow in patches of sunlight around my apartment building. (You see why I had to move.) The temperatures are still wintery here--mid 20s at night sometimes with highs of 40s and 50s most days.

The things that made it ALL WINTER included beets, lettuce, spinach (small but good), carnations, chard, and strawberries that I bought on sale at the end of the season and never got around to planting (are *they* confused). It's nice to see signs of growth now. Things that made it almost all the way through were nasturtiums and surprisingly a volunteer tomato from the compost and an eggplant. I actually pulled the tomato up because the fruit wasn't that great and I wanted the pot for something else, but I left the eggplant to see if would show signs of life.

On the whole, interesting, and it was a nice place to sit on a sunny cold winter day. Now the real experiment starts --- my spring crops going in a couple or three weeks early and then this fall I'll try to get the winter things mature "by the book."

Structurally mine collapsed under the snow once but I repaired it without damage to the plants and not terrible damage to the plastic. Reinforcing the t-joints along the ridge line made a big, big difference. (thinner PVC pipe about a foot or two long inserted through the joint and inside the ribs, perpendicular to the ridge line.)