I'll add to this that one week in the shade and then one in increasing sun is ideal if you can be faffed (if you've no shade then horticultural fleece is very handy shading material). To 'harden off' your plants, the standard recipe is to place them outdoors in a relatively shady, sheltered spot for a fortnight, bringing them indoors again at night. An increasingly harsher environment prompts this formation. Why? Because the waxy cuticle that protects the upper and lower leaf surfaces from desiccation via excessive sunshine and wind isn't encouraged to fully form under glass, and it takes time for the plant to build up this horticultural armoured plating. ALL veg, if grown under cover, need to be acclimatised to the outdoors before being planted out permanently. OK, so it was a sunny day with a firm breeze, making this an extreme case, but let's all learn from my mistake. Frantically digging the alarmingly wilted beans back up and placing them under glass was a pointless exercise the damage had been done. It was like someone had taken a flame gun to them. "Surely they can just be placed outside, right?" Twenty minutes after I'd made that assumption I was proved horribly wrong. I'd also clocked that broad beans were super-hardy as they're one of the few vegetables that can be sown on the plot during February. "Brilliant!" I thought, "these are going to romp away in the garden". I'd sown some broad beans under glass in early March and, even though I say so myself, they were looking mighty grand: plentiful, lush leaves in rude health. I remember being abruptly introduced to this concept about 20 years ago. This last benefit, though, has a bit of a caveat to it, because that nurturing environment is nothing like the outside world. It allows your veg to be raised in the nurturing environment of a greenhouse. It enables you to position your crops at exactly the spacings you want. It negates the need for fiddly (and wasteful) thinning out. It maximises your outdoor growing space as crops are in the ground for less time. It would be a shame to let all that work go to waste.Transplanting veg makes a lot of sense. You have to plan a week out to do it before the transplants go in the garden or they will die. Hardening off isn’t hard, just time-consuming. The fertilizer gives them a boost and helps keep them from going into transplant shock. It also puts the fertilizer in the root zone for the new plants. Wetting the soil around them keeps that soil from wicking all the moisture out of your plants and killing them. WaterĪfter you plant your transplants, water them in. I would advise picking it up at a nursery instead of mail because it is heavy, and the shipping adds a lot to the cost. I use Espoma company (GT40) Garden-tone 3-4-4. Follow the directions on the package for how much to use. Vegetables are heavy feeders and need to be fertilized about every four weeks. Place the seedlings in the sun for 2-4 hours.īefore transplanting your seedlings, spread fertilizer for vegetables over the area and work it into the first 2-3 inches of soil.Move the seedlings to the same location and leave them out.The plants should be in the same spot for 2-4 hours, then come back inside.Put the seedlings in a sheltered, shady area for 1 hour, then move them back inside.If you harden them off, then move the transplants inside for more than 24 hours for some reason, you have to start all over again. Hardening off takes about a week, so start about a week before you want to plant your transplants. Your pampered seedlings don’t know how to handle wind, sunlight, and the other parts of being outdoors. Hardening off is the process of getting seedlings adjusted to living outside. If you do the same, you must harden them off before planting, or they will die when planted. I start my seedlings inside instead of buying them from the nursery.
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