For more than 20 years this was my greatest fear as I tended an instructional greenhouse at a major university. My greatest relief in my recent retirement is that I can “enjoy” the cold a bit more.

The fact that the sun did not come out may have been quite a blessing. Generally it has been found that the biggest amount of damage from freezing in plants occurs when the sun jump starts the metabolism of the plants right after dawn. You might have tried to run water over the plants to protect them and slowly warm them up. This is done in some commercial vegetable growing to protect crops.

Also you were lucky that the water pipes didn’t freeze. They can actually break & twist from the force and flail about wildly breaking lots of other things. I’ve actually seen this. It’s so dramatic it made the front page of the paper…