If you put them outside and the weather becomes cold, scorching hot or frosty, bring your plants back in again even if it’s before the allotted time as it may be too much for them to cope with otherwise.
It doesn’t have to be this prescriptive – judge how long to leave your plants outside depending on how well they’re thriving, and look at the weather forecast first – if it predicts frost or scorching sun, keep your plants indoors.
HARDEN TOMATO SEEDLINGS FULL
Day 12: Introduce your plants full time to the joys of outdoor living.Day 11: Put your plants outside for 22 hours.Day ten: Put your plants outside for 20 hours.Day nine: Put your plants outside for 18 hours.Day eight: Put your plants outside for 16 hours.Day seven: Put your plants outside for 14 hours.Day six: Put your plants outside for 12 hours.Day five: Put your plants outside for ten hours.Day four: Put your plants outside for eight hours.Day three: Put your plants out for six hours.Day two: Put your plants outside for four hours.Day one: Put your plants outside for two hours.It’s incredib ly simple, if a tad inconvenient should you have a day job. Generally speaking, plants don’t like being shocked (though there are some that respond best to harsh treatment, which I’ll write about another day.) As such, you have to ease them into outdoor living gently, over the course of a week or two, so that they get used to sun, wind, rain and all the other things they’ll have to deal with outdoors. (Should you be interested, the above picture shows peas, strawberries, garlic, tomatoes, pumpkin, mint and cucumber, all of which will be moving outside at various stages over the next fortnight or so.) Basically, this means getting plants used to being outside after growing up n a windowsill or indoors. I decided to start hardening my seedlings off today because there’s still a reasonable amount of cloud cover (baby seedlings freak out in direct sunlight if they’re used to being indoors). One of the joys of sunny days is that they call you out into the garden even when you’ve got proper grown-up things to do (which is why gardening and freelance writing work so well together, because you can garden by day and write stuff to pay the bills by night).
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