Marilyn, as you were chronicling which containers were "more better" did you notice which semps survived your erratic winters best? Those would be the ones that I would concentrate on buying or taking offsets off of survivors to spread across all your containers to increase your bounty. I'm finding even here in CA that not all the varieties love it here. Some semps do better than others. So I am concentrating on keeping those to make me happy...
Oh, and I loved your article with all the research that went with it!!!