Kim,

Congratulations on your success with your seedlings this year.

I start all my tomato and pepper seeds in peat pellets, but they only stay there for a few days. I use one pellet per variety, so if I want 30 plants of a particular variety I sow 30 seeds into the pellet. After they sprout, which is usually in a week or less for tomatoes and sometimes a little longer for peppers, I wait until they have their first true leaves and then I pot them up to paper, plastic or styrofoam cups of soilless mix. So, for me, the seed sowing and sprouting part is quick and easy, but the process of potting up is time-consuming. You cannot put it off either, because a peat pellet will not support that many plants for more than a few days.

Most people who have trouble with peat pellets have trouble with keeping them too wet or alternately having them dry out too much during the day while the gardener is away at work. I don't like "growing on" seedlings in peat pellets, but I like sprouting seeds in them just because it is quick and easy. I'm sprouting annual flowers and herbs in a flat of 72 peat pellets right now, having seeded them a few days ago. Likely I'll start potting up those young seedlings this weekend indoors while it is raining outdoors. (Assuming the rain shows up as forecast.)

I hate peat pots. They either hold too much moisture or wick away moisture from the plant roots and I don't even like buying plants in peat pots. When I buy them in peat pots, I like to get them out of the peat pots as quickly as possible.

When you raise seedlings indoors, they are used to much weaker light and wind movement than what they will have outdoors. They absolutely will die if moved from the indoors to the outdoors suddenly. You need to give them a period of hardening off that is very gradual. This allows them to adjust to stronger outdoor lighting and to wind movement. It isn't just exposure to stronger light that will kill them, but also windburn.

When I raise seedlings indoors, I keep a fan running in the room at least 12 hours a day. The air movement it provides for the plants does a couple of things. First, it helps prevent little mushrooms from sprouting in the soil-less mix, and, secondly, it toughens up the tender vegetation and helps prepare it for the wind to which the plants will be exposed outdoors. However, because the fan in my room is not gusting to 30 or 40 mph like the outdoor winds, I still am careful to put the plants in a location sheltered as much as possible from wind when they first go outdoors.

When you move your plants outdoors, the standard formula is to move them to a sheltered location from wind and then to give them ever-increasing amounts of exposure to both light and wind.

There are many ways to do it, but one of the easiest to keep track of is to give them 1 hour outside the first day, two hours the second day, three hours the third day, etc. By slowly increasing their exposure, you are allowing them to toughen up or harden off at a pace that works for them.

If I am taking plants outside in March for their first time, I go a step farther and put them on the covered porch in the shade for 3 to 5 days first so that they get some wind exposure first and build some tolerance to it before they have to also deal with exposure to the sunlight. It is just too windy in March for plants that have had a soft, easy and cushy life indoors, so a slow and gradual exposure to the wind will save a lot of heartache and prevent windburn of the foliage.

Usually you will find that increasing the plants' exposure by 1 hour each day will harden off the plants just fine and after a week or two of that, they can go into their permanent location. However, if you notice any windburn or sunburn on the plants, slow down their exposure and increase it by a half-hour a day instead of an hour a day. It will take twice as long, but hardening them off too quickly (if they show damage, it is moving too quickly) only gives you dead or damaged plants, so you have to do whatever is best for them.

I try to start hardening off my plants in mid-February on warm days when I can because there is less wind then that what we'll have in March, but of course, that is temperature-driven because sometimes it is too cold to harden them off. I'm a lot farther south than you are though, so I don't know that you'd start hardening off anything that early.

In March, I try to put the plants where there is something to block the strongest winds, especially in their first few days outside. We have had winds gusting in the 30s and 40s, so it has been a challenge this week to put the plants out where they get enough light and wind exposure without getting too much wind.

If, for any reason....like maybe a cold front is coming and bringing heavy rain or snow....you interrupt the hardening-off process and move the plants back inside to stay for a few days, you may have to start all over. If I move plants inside for 2 days or less after they already are used to a half-day or more outside, I can put them back out on the schedule they already were on. But if they stay instead for more than 48 hours, I start all over with the one hour the first day, two hours the second, etc.

It sounds very tedious, but it is just one of those things you need to do to give your plants a great start. I haven't lost a plant to windburn or sunburn since 2009, and I only lost them then because we had one of those awful fire days with high winds. If I could do it over again, I would have taken the 20 minutes needed to move all my plants back indoors before I left to go to the fire, but we had a monster fire breaking out in a populated area and I decided to take a chance and leave the plants outside. I came home many hours later to badly sunburned (it was a cloudy day too!) and windburned plants, many of which died. This week, the same thing could have happened to my plants, but I had to leave the fire to come back to the fire station to pick up some gasoline and bags of ice from our deep freeze, so stopped by the house to let the dogs out and in again and to put the plants into the greenhouse and garage to get them out of the sun and wind. By the time I got home and put up the plants, they had been outside about a half-hour longer than they should have been, but that didn't hurt them. It would have hurt them if I hadn't put them up and they had another 3 hours of sun and 7 hours of wind exposure because once I left the house again, I wouldn't return home for another 7 or 8 hours. Yesterday, I left them inside all day because I knew I had to go do fire stuff and I am glad I did because I was away from the house for most of the day. Only the 5 early tomato plants were outside in the morning and when we came back home at mid-day for a couple of minutes, I moved them into the greenhouse to get them out of high wind. I had been leaving them outside all day, but the wind was too rough yesterday for that.

It is very challenging to harden off plants on a consistent schedule if you work a standard 40-hour (or more) workweek. When I lived in Fort Worth and had a full-time job, I simply tried to do the best I could with my plants and work schedule. I might start hardening off the plants with 1 hour on Wed. afternoon after work, then 2 hours on Thursday, and 3 hours on Friday. Then, on Saturday, I might take a chance and leave them out for 5 hours and then for 6 or 6.5 hours on Sunday. On Monday, I put them out and left them out all day, but tried to place them in a spot where nearby trees would be shading them once they'd had 6 or 7 hours of full sun. The next day, I placed them slightly farther from the shade so they might get 7-8 hours of sun. At that point, I could put them in the ground in spring. (Obviously in summer, you need to harden them off longer because the day length is longer.)

With creative placement of plants where buildings can block some of the wind and where buildings or other plants can block some of the sun after a certain point, you can harden off plants even though you work and are away from home all day, but it is a little more challenging.

As you learned first-hand, if you move plants directly from an indoor environment with low wind movement and low light levels (even bright indoor lights do not begin to approach the intensity of the light they'll get from the sun) outdoors to full sun and full wind exposure without a hardening-off period, the plants likely will not survive. Sometimes, they do survive but they are so damaged that they never really recover and remain weak and grow slowly.

Hope this helps,

Dawn

Dawn thanks so much.It helps me a great deal.
I knew I could count on you to help me with the transition.I usually am home by 3 pm so i can start then.
Like I said my 1st very lame attempt at gardening was with big desire and no knowlegde, except what is on the seed packet...sow inside plant outside after danger of frost.
I was very sad when everything died a fast death.
Well thank God for the internet. when I cant do anything physically I study and study and study some more. when my eyes get tired I make the font bigger.
I have learned so much here and even tho I dont always comment I am reading and learning from all you experts.
I am looking forward to actually growing tomatoes this year,not just beautiful plants and many other new things.

So far from seed I have up and growing really well
cabbage red and green
broccoli
cauliflower
tomatoes 9 dif varieties
peppers sweet banana, bell 3 types, jalapeno
basil 3 types
onions
marjoram
dill
rosemary
cilantro
lavendar
and a few flowers
The peppers tomatoes and basil are really healthy and big since I planted them first.
I keep a fan blowing on them while the lights are on about 16 hours a day. And I keep the lights 2" from the top leaves.They are also surrounded on 3 sides by reflective material. Some days I have come home and the tomatoes are in the lights. I try to move the chains every night but apparently I miss one once in awhile.
I have 5 lights setup right now and hope to get more to start more flowers.
Most of this is for experimenting this year and will give alot of the plants away when they are ready. I personally do not need 80 tomatoe plants this year.I am just excited that it seems like it is actually working well and all my plants look healthy.
Kim

Kim,

For what it is worth, I often grow 2 to 4 times as many tomato plants as I need. That gives me backups in case the garden is hit by a hail storm, tornado, high wind, snowstorm, flooding, late freeze or heavy frost, etc. shortly after it is planted.

I usually don't need the backups, but having them gives me peace of mind. I usually just give the extras away or, if I've held them pretty late in the season, when they are getting too old to be good transplants, I just compost them or feed them to the deer. (The deer, along with many other varmints, visit the compost pile every night to see if there is anything there worth eating. Sometimes, perhaps in return for whatever treats they find there, they leave me little piles of deer scat in the driveway by the compost pile.)

Every one of us was a beginning gardener at one time and had to learn things the hard way....by doing it the wrong way and then trying to figure out what went wrong and why...and how to avoid repeating that mistake. That's how you learn.....and it is a lot easier to learn things now just by googling the topic of interest than it was to learn those same things back in the day before we had the internet.

Dawn

Thank you Dawn.
That is a great idea. I think I will reserve 10 plants just in case I need them. The others I will give away becuse the one variety, rutgers, that was really old seed [ I thought ] came up like gangbusters and is looking better than any other.I have about 40 of those and really only want 2 or 3.
kim