This is Weed and this is Wack with WOWDY Gardens. We are an organic gardening show focusing on, do it yourself in the garden and save money while you’re doing it. What’s today’s topic? Well, it’s springtime and we’re going to talk about how to harden off those plants that you’ve worked a week or two on, starting from seedlings in your window seal. And now you’re thinking about moving these little seeds seedlings outdoors and it’s still early spring and you want to acclimate them slowly. And I think we call the process hardening, hardening off. Yes, yes, yes. We did have a couple of warm days here last week. I think it reached almost 80 degrees here in DC. And that prompted us all to think, well, it’s time to get out there and get our gardens moving. And I myself moved all, well, not all, but I’d say you have
of all the tomato seedlings that I’ve started out to my flimsy hotbox that I was now held together with tape and rope. And it’s certainly not airtight at all. But well, let’s go over a few things that you should consider. First, you have to have a good location picked one that’s protected from too much direct sun and definitely protected from too much wind.
You want to start gradually. You might want to put some of your seedlings out for a few hours and then bring them back in. So you want to increase your exposure slowly and you got to monitor and adjust. You got to pay attention to the weather report. Yeah, exactly. You know, open the tops of the thing and when it’s hot and they can get, they can get some rain that way and they can get some sunlight.
And then you close the thing, of course the sun goes through the thing. And you don’t want to do it too early. You want the seedlings to… They should be at least six inches tall before you bring them outside. My tomato plants are currently, I’ve outgrown their windowsill home. So I moved them outside and we had a frost. So I had to cover them with floating rows of plants.
And we did have an episode on how to build cold frames. And when you did that, you made sure that the fabric or the cloth was not touching the plant, right? In a few cases they are touching, but the plants are big and healthy enough to survive some loss of leaf.
There’s a good location in your yard and start gradually and gradually increase the exposure to being outdoors and monitor and adjust accordingly. You know, if there’s going to be a freeze and you can’t cover some of your sensitive plants, you might want to bring them in. Right, right. And be patient. That’s my problem. I always move things outside too early.
But you know, if they’ve gotten as big as my tomato plants, they’ll be okay just as you cover them up. That’s right. There are certain things you can get that kind of insulate the plants when you plant them and different gadgets I’ve tried over the years. But frankly, the best thing to do is just to let them grow in the hot box. Now your hot box, my hot box is about a foot tall in the back, maybe 16 inches tall in the back.
And a foot tall in the front. And so I can have things in there and in small pots and they can grow up to just about the roof of the thing. So I can have them there probably all of April. And actually after this cold spell we have that’s happening just right this this minute here in DC, we had a last night temperature was 34 degrees. Now that that’s passed and I will be able
to give these things away. And I live a few blocks away and we had a real frost in my neck of the woods. I had a little dish of water left outside and there was ice on it this morning. But everything that I covered with with plastic or cloth did just fine. I’ve left the plastic on because that’s translucent. But things I did cover with other protective things that that don’t let sun
light in I did I did remove this morning. So you take the the covers off during the day and then you put them back on at night. Depending depending on the plastic I’ve left on today because it’s a cold day. And for my hot box I would lift the lid up and have the lids open all day and then close them at night. Right. So basically this requires a lot of monitoring and you have to have time on your hands to do this.
So this is a weed signing off and this is whack from Wowdy Gardens. Join us next week. We’ll be back.