You can over-winter peppers. I've done that with the small ornamentals and been successful but they wither at the whiff of a cool night. Serious heat-lovers - along with tomatoes.

Garlic: I'm not sure about more, bigger, sooner. There are those baggies of very white coated garlic they bring in from China. The Warehouse has seed garlic, though I've only seen it, not grown it. And, if you have friends in Blenheim area - lots of garlic grown there - and harvested in February. (In time for wine festivals, ripening figs, and other decadences...)

Some of my garlic clumps stay in the ground all year to keep the roses company. Every so often they flower. I suspect that soil type and aspect probably has a lot to do with size and speed. A sandy-ish soil with added humus more than recent compost might be part of the answer.

With the peppers - I think that this year I'll go for biggish containers and all the sun I can get, plus protection to hurry them along. By the time they consider flowering and fruiting, if I plant at Labour Weekend, it's nearly time to close down for winter! I don't enjoy the sort of Mediterranean climate that they seem to thrive in.

Some of the GW sites are friendly and welcoming - Rocky Mountains and Bulbs, for example. And the frugal gardening people who were all wekas in a past life, I'm sure.

Particular people are well worth heeding - calistoga, who is great on container gardening and general things, lindac, pnwgal48 who gardens on a pocket handkerchief and works as a horticulturalist - really knows her plants and growing conditions, donnabaskets for bulbs - and chemocurl, mr subjunctive for house plants. They are all kind and usually courteous to newbies.

Fun places to be include Name That Plant! where people from anywhere and all over post their pictures of plants they can't name - common and not-known-in-NZ. And the Weeds... there are some nightmares I hope we never see here. Kudzu grass. Eek!

The UK site is also useful. And the Pacific North West - Washington State and Oregon - are most like us, as well as coastal British Columbia in Canada. The Californians are pleased to say how their 9 zones are nothing like ours - and I agree. Worse than Central Otago in mid summer. (So's the mid west. As bad as Aus with temps into the late thirties and early forties.)

Hope that helps. I'm out to deck the plants with clouds of frost cloths. Tra-la-la-la-la...

And - just as you did here - start your own thread rather than piggy-backing on someone else's question. If you do - you're more likely to be answered.

And don't worry about being a Kiwi asking six months out. Mostly you'll get an answer.

BTW - checking out the South African Plants site can be useful, too. And they're in the same hemisphere.