I figure right now is a good time as any to refresh ourselves on the hardening off process.

For those of you who are growing your seedlings indoors right now and you're ready to get

them out into the garden, well the first time you do this, and hopefully you've not made

this mistake, but a lot of people have, you might just accidentally kill your plants

and think about it this way, remember that movie Bubble Boy where the kid was in a bubble

as his immune system was so fragile that when he was let out they kept him in the bubble

because they said if he's exposed to any outside germs or environmental conditions

he's going to suffer and maybe even get sick and die, well it's kind of the same when

you're starting off your indoor sewn plants.

Think about it, you've given them the perfect germination environment, one that does not

map to your outdoors right now, the perfect lighting, heat, soil mix, some fertilizer, etc.

Then when you put them outside they just get blasted by the reality of the ecosystem

outdoors.

And so there's a process that gardeners have come up with called hardening off that

acclimatizes things that have been grown indoors to outdoor conditions.

So how do you actually do this?

Well generally speaking what you want to do is when you know it's about to plant.

So let's say you know you're going to plant on April 1st, well it turns out that you

should probably start hardening those plants off a week before that date.

So maybe the third week of March.

Now the way to do it is you want some sort of sheltered spot outdoors, maybe a greenhouse

or a cold frame or even just a shelf and you can cluster all of the pots together.

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