Larry, My earliest ones will go outside tomorrow. I hope you have grown them cool after they germinated. I plan to put this first flat in the ground on Sunday. As I may have mentioned I stagger plant mine because I don't have room inside to start them all at once. I have two batches in flats, one on a cool bench under lights ready to go out to harden off and one still on the warm bench. The third batch is in a bowl on the kitchen counter presoaking and I will do one more batch after that.

Dororthy, this is something new for me so I am just feeling my way through. I planted on the 20th., no pre- soak, dont remember if they had any heat, if they did they came off just when breaking through, been under lights after breaking through potting mix.

I only have 99 plants (very low on room) and they are 2 to 3 per cell (4 count cells or news paper rolls).

I am not sure what you mean (grown them cold). Some have been in the bathroom, the others have been in the living room floor. The only heat is from the lights and room temperature but I expect they have been 70 or 80 degrees with the lights above them. If I have to grow colder I will have to rig something up out in the shed, which I can do tomorrow if needed.

I have a small pup tent type cold frame 4'x6' that I put up to place plants in when it gets closer to planting time. If my plants will be better in that I can set it up tomorrow.

We have the house so junked up from trying to do a little remodeling that we dont have room for anything.

Larry

Larry,

All seedlings started indoors and grown in relatively stable temperatures, low air movement (even a fan on high speed cannot simulate March winds), and artificial lighting must be hardened off gradually to outdoor conditions.

If you take plants that have been grown inside their entire life and transplant them into the garden without hardening them off to the harsher outdoor conditions, the sun exposure, wildly varying temperatures and wind will kill most or all of them or severely set them back.

I move most vegetable transplants outside to the sunporch as soon as daytime temperatures allow. My sugar snap peas went outside the minute the smallest bit of green popped up out of the seed-starting mix, so they have been grown in sunlight and wind and wildly fluctuating temperatures. I have left the pea plants outside at night unless temperatures were forecast to go below the mid-20s. My snap peas have had ample exposure, therefore, to sunlight, strong winds (I did move them back onto the sunporch on two days when winds were gusing in the upper 30s and lower 40s) and cold temperatures, so they are ready to go into the ground right now. I'll plant them today or tomorrow, depending on whether I "get around to it".

If your peas have been inside a structure all along, they must be hardened off before being planted. I usually move plants to a shady part of the sunporch for a couple of days. Then, I move them closer to the sunporch windows for an hour or two for a couple of days. Then, I move them outside for 1 hour the first day, 2 hours the second day, 3 hours the third day, etc. After about a week to ten days they are fully hardened off and can go into the ground.

If you don't harden off your plants and they suddenly have to cope with sunlight from sunup until sundown, the leaves sunburn...and it doesn't take long for that sunburn to occur. If enough of the leaves burn, the plants die. Wind damage also can burn them and severe windburn can kill plants. If your plants have been growing at a constant 60 or 70 degrees, sudden exposure to temperatures that are significantly colder than that can stunt them. For all the above reasons, hardening off is essential. If you try to skip the hardening off process, you'll likely lose your plants.

Peas can go into the ground anytime in March and my feeling is the earlier the better, but you do have to be prepared to cover them up if your temps are headed for the upper teens or lower 20s. Small pea plants tolerate cold really well, but once they're large enough to start blooming, cold temps and frost can knock their blooms off or can damage the tips of the vines. I keep floating row covers and old sheets handy in a stack on a shelf in the garage so I can throw them over peas on very cold nights.

Dawn

Thanks Dawn, I will start moving all my Cole crops out. I don't have a garage or porch so they will have to be on a table out side, but I can put a wind break on it.

Larry

Larry,

You're welcome.

Before we built the garage and the screened-in porch that we later converted to a sunporch (just last fall), I just put mine on the ground or on a table and started out with them under a tree. Even trees that haven't leafed out yet provide some shade from the limbs. I also used each day's wind direction to select which side of the house to place the plants close to so they'd have some blocking of the wind, especially their first few days out. If you put up a wind screen be sure it is situated so a strong gust of wind doesn't knock the wind screen onto the plants. (I lost a lot of plants once when the wind screen was blown right on top of them!)

Dawn