What's popping my gardening friends? Hopefully your seedlings are popping right now and actually that ties in very nicely to what we're talking about today and that would be the topic of hardening off. I've heard from a lot of gardeners that this is their most confusing and least well understood part of starting seeds and getting them transplanted into the garden successfully.

So let's go ahead and talk about it a little bit and see if we can't demystify this process

a little bit for you guys, so you have more success when you're starting seeds.

So first of all, let's talk about the life of a seedling.

Let's imagine you're the seedling, right?

So let's say that you come to life in this perfect beautiful climate, maybe even like San Diego where I live.

Just rubbing it in. I'm sorry. Let's say it's 70 degrees.

Let's say there isn't any wind. Let's say that you get the exact amount of nutrients, water, light that you want.

Things are good. You're eating well. You're drinking well. You're getting a nice little tan, right?

Your seedlings are this is what's happening to your seedlings they're in a perfect environment if you are starting your seeds

properly indoors they're getting everything they want and they're getting the exact right

amount of it. So what happens when you just jarringly rip them out of that

paradise, throw them into some soil and say hey good, good luck buddy, see if you can make it on your own.

Well, a lot of bad things will happen if you do that, because you did not go through the process of hardening them off.

Now you could in theory get away with not hardening your seedlings off,

but in my opinion it doesn't make a lot of sense because why would you not want to

invest a little bit of time in hardening them off to make sure they're ready to

transplant so that that success rate goes way way up.

So the basic idea here is you need to acclimate your seedlings to the environment that they're actually

going to live in.

This environment endures is the environment they started in, but the environment that they're going to live in is going to have much more fluctuation in basically every condition,

wind, light, temperature, soil moisture, etc.

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