With an eye on the weather, you could begin to harden off plants around the beginning of May. This process could take a week or two of slowly exposing the plants to the elements. Remember that you are exposing them to *all* the elements....wind,rain,temperatures as well as the sun. You need to place them in a shaded, protected spot for a few hours each day, slowly increasing the time and then move them into more exposed locations also where they will get some breezes, higher temps, more sun etc. Wind can really destroy a tender new plant just as quickly as the sun can. I harden off my young vegetable plants but still protect them when I plant out with 3 qt nursery pots I cut the bottoms out of. I place the resulting "tube" around each tomato, pepper, broccoli, melon plant etc which allows some sun, wind and rain in but protects it from the worst of the wind. I remove them after a couple of weeks. They actually help the plant grow faster because they create a warm microclimate but they don't get too hot because they are totally open at the top. Make sure they are well watered when you begin the hardening off process-a well hydrated plant can withstand more stress than one already hurting for lack of water. Leaving them outside for a whole day, right off the bat while you're at work would probably be too much at the beginning. Unless you had an open porch that would provide shade and protection from the wind and knew that the temperatures wouldn't drop suddenly while you were away. Better to start out with say, a few hours in the morning and work your way up to 8-10 hours and then with milder weather leave out all night too. Someone on the Starting from Seed forum mentioned leaving them in the garage with the door open. That would be a good idea if they were back far enough from the sun and wind at first....and if you live in a neighbourhood where you could leave the door open while you're gone all day. :)

Good morning Dawn and everyone else! I haven't posted in awhile because I've been busy "pre-gardening". This weekend has been cold and rainy here in far NE OK although so far not too bad. I have been doing a bunch of "wintersowing" thanks to your tip, Dawn, several weeks ago. It really makes sense for some plants that require cold stratification, and I'm trying it for some others as well. So I have been busy acquiring milk jugs and baking my garden soil to use in them, since the expense of seed starting mix has overwhelmed the whole purpose of having a garden for me, which is economy. Well, that and taste. But anyway... I've been making seed tape of my lettuce, onion, and radish seed and I was going to put them in the ground this weekend but looks like I'll need to wait. I've been over on the seed trading gardenweb site and met a bunch of really nice people. Thanks to them and to the people over on the wintersowing site, I have lots of new seed to try this year. On the frugal gardening site, I learned how to make newspaper pots, and I think that's the best idea since sliced bread! And on the Garden Art site, I saw the coolest things. A teacup birdfeeder, a man and a dachshund made of clay flower pots, and bottle trees! I dragged an old artificial Christmas tree out of the attic, stripped it down to just the metal branches, then started picking up cobalt blue bottles from my job (one of the businesses is a recycling center -- we collect clear and brown glass, but people keep leaving green and blue, for which they don't have a market right now, and they have to dispose of them. (If you have a recycling center near you, just don't go and take things out of the bins -- ask first. Anything else is stealing, even if it IS just a blue wine bottle!) My bottle tree is coming along, I still don't have quite enough small blue bottles, but I add a few each week. AND THEN.... I got interested in heirloom beans. I have grown Lazy Wife snap beans for years and never knew they were "heirloom". I went to a gourmet site, bought one-pound bags of several kinds of interesting beans. I will have enough to plant and enough to sell for seed at my spring yard sale. At 30 beans in a bag for only fifty cents each, I can double the money I spent (if they all sell, which probably they won't, but then maybe I can use the extras to trade.) But even if I only sell some, I may still make my money back. The only thing is, the gourmet site sold the beans to eat, not to plant, so I had no information on growing habit (whether pole or bush, for instance). Some of the names of the beans were not found anywhere else on the Internet, but I went to the "Beans & Legumes" site and some of the regulars over there have been helping me identify the beans. It appears that many of the beans I bought as dry "gourmet" beans are most commonly used as snap beans! Leave it to those Gourmets... I'm just an old redneck woman and I look at my Lazy Wife dry beans as seed, not something I could put in a pot with a hambone and cook. So I'm getting my horizons broadened in lots of ways. I still have a few beans the "Bean Experts" didn't recognize, if anyone wants to give it a try I'll post a list. My Datura seeds, none of which came up at all last spring, germinated much sooner than I expected this year, after being sanded and soaked and set under a lightbulb in January. Out of the 15 I planted, I got 10 plants. I've repotted into foam 12-oz drink cups and they are all getting their 9th and 10th leaves, sitting under the fluorescent lights. The leaves and stems look so nice and healthy, I'm very proud of our accomplishment, Dawn! And my seed starting mat came, so I've replanted the pepper plants that didn't come up, and I'm getting some sporadic results. I'm thinking the purple pepper seed that I took from peppers that were given me last summer were just not mature enough, because they are the only ones that not one seed has germinated. The tomatoes that I planted in January are doing well under the fluorescent lights. I realize I planted too soon. Usually I plant them on the last weekend in January, they take a week or two to germinate, and by April 15 they are still somewhat small. So this year I decided I wanted bigger plants, but I overplanned. I used seed-starting mix, which the seeds loved, and set them under an incandescent light that provided heat, which the seeds also loved. Some of them were popping their heads out within a few days. Others took about a week. So that was a real jump-start and probably too much. Now I'm seeing some stress in a few of the plants, because I think I'm keeping them too wet so I'm going to let them dry out a bit and hope for the best! I've already repotted them once. And I've decided I do not like those little peat pots. The roots grow right through them and start drying out. The only advantage is that you don't have to remove the pot when you repot. So far my newspaper pots are not letting the roots grow through but they're just as easy to repot, plus the newspaper, when below ground level, will decompose and help retain moisture around the roots. All in all, if the weather cooperates and my back holds out, I should have a really interesting garden this year. Plenty for my "audience" that walks along the sidewalk outside my back fence to ask questions about and point out to their friends. I've met a lot of people in town this way. Since I work full time I don't get many chances to "neighbor". This year I'm going to try to plant more flowers, as attractants to lady bugs, and of course the butterflies and hummingbirds. And because the squirrels keep digging up the mammoth sunflower seed I plant, I've wintersown them this year so I can have more than just a few plants. I myself cannot see one benefit to having squirrels. DH and his family ate squirrel when he was a boy. They were poor sharecroppers and would've starved to death otherwise. Maybe that's one good use for a squirrel.

Dorothy, My experience with planting in the ground is exactly the same as yours. Not only did they begin to rot without sprouting, but something was eating the peas underground because they would entirely disappear overnight without a trace. You and I do sprout our peas in similar ways and plant out at about the same time even though I am a lot further south and it would seem like I could plant earlier than you, but I can't....and I blame it on my cold microclimate. If I planted much earlier than you, I don't think I'd get a crop any earlier. Amunk1, One thing I love about gardening is that everything we do can be viewed as an experiment. Try something one way, learn from that and then the next time you can try it a different way in order to improve upon the previous effort. My entire garden is just one big experiment every year with many smaller experiments going on within the big experiment. Dorothy and I both have been gardening a long time(and I won't rat out her age or mine by admitting exactly how long) and I guarantee you I do not do things the exact same way now that I did them in the 1980s or 1990s or early 2000s, and certainly not the way I did things in the 1970s when I was very young and tended to love my plants to death by overwatering them. It is important to not get stuck in a rut and keep on doing things the same way you did them in the past. There's always room for improvement and it is fun to try to improve your garden's appearance and productivity every year. Realistically speaking, here in OK, sometimes we are happy if we just manage to keep our gardens alive. Peas grow best and taste best when they mature before temperatures begin regularly exceeding 75 degrees. That statement sounds so calm and logical, but Oklahoma weather is not calm and logical. It is a wild roller coaster ride, and I find it rare for us to stay cool enough long enough for my snap peas to grow well enough that they are producing much of a crop while the daytime highs are still in the 70s. In that sense, this is looking like a really good pea year. The issue, though, is that just because we have highs at our house in the 70s this week, that doesn't mean they'll last long. We could be in the 80s next week and the 90s the week after that. That is why is it so important to plant early. Technically, the ground usually is a bit too cold for peas to sprout during the OSU-recommended planting time. They will sprout if conditions are perfect, but if we are too wet or too cold, they can rot before they sprout. That's why a lot of us sprout our peas indoors by soaking them in water for a few hours, wrapping them in a paper towel or coffee filter and popping them into soil-less mix as soon as the peas have small sprouts. I have done that every year I've grown them here except the first year, when I planted them in the ground and they sprouted and grew...and then it got hot and they died before making very many peas. The odd thing is that while they won't sprout easily in cold soil, they grow well in it. So, we start early and baby them through a few bitter cold nights (by covering them up) because it is the best way to "guarantee" a crop, though you really aren't guaranteeing a crop so much as improving your chance of getting one. In areas of the country that have a slower transition from winter's cold to summer's heat, gardeners can just wait for the soil to warm up some more and then plant the pea seeds directly in the ground. In OK, where we can literally go from too cold to too hot in one week some years, we don't have that luxury. I deviated from sprouting the pea seeds in paper towels this year because I wanted to see if they would sprout in soil-less mix as easily as in paper towels. They did, but were a little slower. I started early, so that wasn't a big issue. Had I been running behind on seed-starting, I would have sprouted them first in paper towels to speed up the process. I learned to grow almost everything in the ground from seed first (except tomatoes, peppers and eggplant which need to be started indoors far in advance of the transplant date) and then learned how to start seed indoors for transplants. I think that helped because I already knew when everything should be put into the ground, so all I had to work on was learning how early to start them indoors so they were the right size at transplant time and learning how to harden off plants grown indoors, which I learned in Texas in the 1990s. I had to change things a bit when I moved farther north to OK because our nights stay a lot colder a lot longer. With greenhouses, there is a learning curve. The smaller the greenhouse,l the harder it is to regulate the temperature and the light. I feel like the shadecloth made growing in the greenhouse so much easier. It also helps to have a fan to give your plants good air movement for good plant health while in the greenhouse, and I think that Dorothy has a heated propagation bench, but I don't. I'm going to assume you've seen the OSU Garden Planning Guide that has planting dates for cool season crops in winter/spring and warm season planting dates in spring/mid-summer. So, instead of linking it again since we link it often in various 'new gardener' threads, I am going to link the Fall Garden Planning Guide. You can look ahead to what you can plant in summer (and a few things in fall) for a fall harvest. I usually start my seeds for my fall tomato plants in May so I can put the fall tomatoes in the ground in mid-June through early July. It seems silly to a non-gardener when they look at the beautiful tomato plants in my garden in June and then look at the tiny seedlings I'm growing for fall. Not being gardeners, they don't understand why a person starts new plants for fall. If they were gardeners they'd understand that July and August are really tough on tomato plants here and that fresh, new plants that just went into the ground in early summer have more vigor and do better in fall than older plants that are running out of energy. For a long time....and I mean a couple of decades or further back, I carried over the spring plants through the fall but once I tried with fresh plants for fall, I was amazed at how much better they do. Now, see, that is the sort of experiment that pays off. I never would have known how well it would work if I hadn't tried it. One of the wonderful thing about gardening in Oklahoma is we have a very long growing season, although technically it is broken up into smaller sub-seasons. That means that we get a second chance in fall with many cool-season and warm-season plants. Keep in mind, we often have to plant in ridiculously hot and miserably dry weather in June through August so we can be harvesting in September through December or later. The fall season really is a fall harvesting season because the fall garden planting mostly occurs in summer. Technically, the fall garden planting season starts with tomatoes going into the ground July 1st. That means you need to start your seeds 6-8 weeks before that so you'll have transplants ready by July 1st, and I often put them into the ground a week or two earlier than that, usually to fill a space made empty by the removal of a cool-season crop that is finished producing. I personally haven't had much luck with snap peas in fall. Often, just about the time the heat drops enough that the plants grow well,, we turn significantly colder and we get too cold too early and the blossoms drop off the plants. I keep trying though, because maybe one of these years I'll get it right. Some crops, though, like kale, cauliflower and brussels sprouts do better in the fall than in the spring. Just keep planting and plugging away. Even when you encounter obstacles, every experience is a learning experience. Every learning experience makes you a better gardener. Nobody is successful with every crop every year. I'm happy if 75% if the crops I plant produce an edible harvest. We just have too much odd weather and too many pests to reasonably expect 100% success every year. Remember, too, to enjoy the process. Don't worry, don't hurry....and don't forget to stop and smell the flowers. To me, the process of gardening is more important than the end result. I try to enjoy every day of the journey, and then whatever crop is there at the end of the journey is just a bonus. Gardening is very rewarding and can add great joy to your life, but some years it brings a lot of stress and I think we all find ourselves too garden-stressed at times. If we had perfect weather and no pests, what would we talk about? We'd just sit here saying "the broccoli is going bonkers, the potatoes are perfect, the lettuce is lovely and the tomatoes are terrific" and it would be so boring. Generally, gardening in OK includes a certain amount of, hmm, let's call it "drama", and it often arrives in the form of late freezes, late snow, sleet, hail, tornadoes, derecho winds, microbursts, an occasional haboob, wind-driven wildfire, graupel, thundersnow, flooding rain or, conversely, months with almost no rain at all and tremendous drought. Sometimes I think to myself "if the weather was perfect, what would we discuss here?" Not to worry, though, because it never will happen. Our weather is many things, but "perfect" is not one of them, but we just keep on keeping on anyhow. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: Fall Garden Planning Guide

I am no expert, but I am about a week into hardening off around 30 pepper plants. They were raised from seed in a very pampered environment, with flourescent lighting right over their heads, a fan blowing them around just a bit, and heating mats to keep the temp just right day and night. These strengths all turned into weaknesses on their first day outside. They were not ready for sun and wind. I got them out of there after 2 hours; some leaves were burned, most plants were droopy and unwell. They all recovered, but the weeklong process has been difficult for them. They are really toughening up now, though. Though I am a first-year pepper grower with minimal knowledge, I have to say this experience taught me how very important it is to set aside a good-sized block of time for hardening off, and to do it right - a little bit more each day as the plants adjust, while keeping an eye on weaker plants to make sure they are dealing with it. I also recommend you put your spindlier or otherwise more at risk plants more in the shade or part shade, and leave the full sun only for plants that are robust and strong. Please keep in mind that it does not take a lot of sun to overwhelm a plant that has been coddled indoors. One hour of strong direct sun can discolor leaves and leave the plant a mess, and it even killed a few of my tomatoes - just one blazing hour of sun. Gotta be careful when hardening off.