Depending on your planned planting time, this typically means you will start hardening off plants a couple of weeks before your last frost date. This often means that you will be hardening off your plants before it is considered “safe” to plant them outside-before your last frost date and/or before soil temperatures have warmed. Plan hardening off within the time frame of your target planting date. In a pinch, the process can be condensed into a week to 10 days and in a real pinch, as few as three days, but the best results and easiest transition for your plants is to harden them off over the recommended 14-day period. Ideally, you should plan to start hardening off your plants about two weeks before you plan to plant them outside. What Plants Need to Be Hardened Off For Outdoor Planting?īegin hardening off your transplants two weeks before you plan to plant them outside. At worst, plants will die and you’ll need to start all over again with replacements. At best it’s a stress the plants don’t need and a sure way to slow and stunt growth. Without hardening off, transplants can suffer from sunburn, cold damage, drowning, wilting, and breakage. And so, indoors plants need to be taught to deal with them-to acclimate to these new, changing growing conditions, to get stronger so they can withstand those conditions. None of these are variations that plants deal with inside in their protected growing environment. Winds and rains come in all variations of volume and strength. Outdoors plants deal with rising and falling temperatures and can commonly experience a range of 20 or 30 degrees in a single day. The light outside is much stronger and more intense. Life indoors comes with none of the inconsistencies or fluctuations of Mother Nature. Life outside is anything but these things. It “rains” just enough, never too much moisture is always there when it is needed. The temperature is always the same and it is always optimal. Their environment has been nothing but stable. Plants that are started inside, whether in your home or in a greenhouse, have lived a protected life. Plants grown in protected environments like inside a house or greenhouse need to be hardened off before outside planting.
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