Chomper works amazingly well when most enemies die before getting to it. An entire path of Spikerocks with melon-pults and kernel-pults firing away will kill most enemies with ease.

I usually have a row of Chompers sitting behind a row of Tall-nuts. Anything that lives long enough to make it to the Tall-nut is killed immediately by the Chomper before it can do damage. Since almost nothing lives to get near the Tall-nut, the Chomper's slow attack speed doesn't matter at all.

Also, repeaters and three-peaters are totally inferior to melon-pults. One pea from a repeater or the like will hit one zombie. With a melon-pult, I can do damage to 1, 5, or 20 zombies with one shot. I can hit as many zombies as there are near each other.

My girlfriend had trouble on that level too. For some reason with Vasebreaker I steamrolled right through it. I only did one attempt on Endless though, made it to round 6.

I have awful luck with Vasebreaker.  I always seem to break the vase with the exploding guy who breaks a bunch more vases creating a ton of zombies before I have plants to kill them.

The best strategy I found with Vasebreaker is to break the rightmost vase of any line. If it's a zombie, break the rightmost vase of other line and so on. Unless you have terrible luck, you'll find some plants and not so many zombies. Then it's holding on until all the zombies are killed, and keep repeating. Except in the Chain reaction level, that one is pure luck. But in the others there aren't many Jacks-in-the-Box. Also, the lantern is quite useful

La planta del pie...

I liked the plantern until I got the fan-type plant which did something similar but didn't need to be taking up a permanent slot on my turf.

Later on I can easily afford to blow 150-200 sun on a plant every so often but "permanently" losing 2-3 squares to keep the fog away is much more painful.

No, I meant the lantern in the Vasebreaker minigame. The lantern in the adventure mode is so-so, it's useful sometimes, but it takes a precious slot that's always needed

I'm going to play this once I get home.

Hopefully within the next 2 days or so I will have my gold trophy.

By the way, with the Zen Garden it is EXTREMELY easy to farm gold. 

I like the spike strips and the watermelon shooters.

I still haven't gotten the trick to that.  All the higher level stuff seems really expensive.  I have less than half the garden filled though.  Maybe it's better with more plants.  It's just that spending 15,000 gold on the record player is... bleh.