I am also experimenting with protecting my tomato plants that I foolishly planted last week (last average frost date showed 4/10 here). I have a carpet tunnel with some C2 christmas lights, some covered with straw and others inside my sunbox frame section and covered with carpet. I removed the bulbs everywhere else except where they are suspended in the middle of the tunnel. I also popped several sunbox sections together to completely cover a section of raspberry. I hope to have fruit this year finally.

I admit I was pretty worried over the weekend. I put the figs trees back inside, and my mother covered some of her hosta and her giant calamondin orange, but everything seems to have come thru okay.

My big worry was the lilacs. 4-5 years ago I planted a Beauty of Moscow at work. It has never bloomed, but last spring it finally showed a tremendous amount of buds. All of the flowers were ruined by the late cold snap, and we only got a few blooms on the other lilac bushes.

This year they are all loaded with buds, and we're keeping our fingers crossed!

The Japanese Maples opened their leaves a little more yesterday with the warm weather, so it's looking like they were protected adequately.

I have a fairly new lilac given to me almost a couple years ago. I didn't get any flowers yet, but it had black 'turds' hanging on it in early spring due to the '07 hard freeze. After hearing about yours I am anxious to look at mine and see if there are any buds. I didn't think to cover it up.

Sounds like you did pretty well! (My tomatoes never look really happy until it's in the 50's at night.)