Hardening Off the Tomatoes and Peppers

The last time I posted about our seedlings, I had thinned them out by separating and re-potting those that had more than one seedling growing in a seed pot.  I carefully labeled each container and was able to separate the intertwined roots without losing a single plant.  The only problem, if you want to call it a problem, is that I now have more pepper plants than I can eat.  It didn't take much searching to find several people who will give the extra pepper plants good homes!

So after I thinned them out, I put them out on the back patio in order to 'harden them off.' Hardening them off involves gradually introducing them to cooler outdoors weather and wind.  The operative word there is gradually.  If you do it too fast, you risk shocking your tender plants.  I have a cold frame that I put hinges on and built out of some windows out of an old home.  Someone was throwing them away and had them stacked by the road.  Now they have been re-purposed.

In the first nights, I had a heat lamp shining hot, bright light inside the cold frame, keeping the plants inside warm.  There is a window on the top of the cold frame and while not airtight, it keeps out the wind and retains the warm air inside.

After a few days, I removed the heat lamp and replaced it with the fluorescent grow light that I had over the plants when they were inside the house.  This slowly acclimates them to the variation in temperature and prepares them for the days to come.

In lifting the top off of the cold frame, you can peer down and see some of the peppers and the tomatoes and eggplant.  I had already removed a flat of peppers to plant that I'll show you in a minute.   If something looks a little strange with the tomatoes, I'll show you why.  Gardening is a trial and error thing.  Once the plants get their second set of leaves, I'll spray fish emulsion on the leaves as a foliar feeding.  When plants are young, the label calls for putting a diluted amount of fish emulsion in the sprayer. That would be 50% of the normal amount of 1 Tablespoon per gallon of water.  So I mixed up my little gallon sprayer with water and 1/2 tablespoon of fish emulsion.

It caused the peppers to turn a bright blue green color and literally jump up out of the soil.  It was by far the best looking pepper seedlings I've ever started.  The tomatoes, by contrast, were hurt by the fish emulsion, even though it was mixed at the same concentration.  The tender leaves on the top were burned by the fish emulsion and turned the leaves a yellowish-white color.  It reminded me of damage that the rice herbicide, Command, causes plants to be unable to carry out photosynthesis and thus, they die.  Fortunately for the tomatoes, they recovered from the fish emulsion damage and put out new green growth.  I have made a note for next year that while peppers thrive with a 1/2 Tablespoon to 1 Gallon water mixture, tomatoes cannot handle this.  I'll experiment with a 1/4 Tablespoon mixture next year.

These are the peppers that I put out in the garden this past Saturday.

If all goes as planned, I'll move the tomato seedlings out to the garden this weekend. Once those are in the ground, I'll start working on planting corn, beans, squash, cucumbers and a myriad of other delicious vegetables we like to plant.