Question about hardening off...

This is my first garden in my new zone, I went from a 9 to a 5. The weather has been lovely (but it will turn!) last frost is around May 17th. I have been putting my plants out every day and taking them in at night.

I have well over 1000 plants and would like to leave them out on mild nights. Problem is i am not sure what mild is. LOL I have peppers, tomatoes, melons, squash, eggplant, etc. What is a SAFE low? I have read this and that and some places say peppers can take a low of x and tomatoes y etc. etc., but i am interested in what temp they are fine with, not what they will probably survive.

40º F would be my safe low temp.

I heard that when tomatoes and peppers get cold it slows their growth. I don't get in a hurry to plant them out now. Anyone else hear that?

My tomatoes are large enough to transplant now so cool weather on the picnic table is good for them right now.....40° is the low for tomatoes. Cantaloupes 45°. 53° for watermelon lows. Squash, peppers, and eggplant...I don't know. If the temps outside are too low, they are wimpy the next forenoon.

Way too cold here! Still freezing at night. Soon we should start having 40s and 50s at night though.

It will be nice not to lug all those flats back in, then out again in the morning.

tomatoes can handle cold alot better than peppers, in my opinion.
Debbie

Thats a lot of plants to lug in and out. Could you cover them with old sheets?
That is what we do here with our tomatoes if there is risk of frost spring and fakll before we get them harvested(short growing season here)

Tombaak, you need a cold frame.
They can be made cheaply and constructed so they are easily dismantled for the OFF season.
Old bed sheets work great, some sort of support can be rigged to hold it above the tender plants.
I use an old sheet over the cold frame on cold nights, like last night.
Saves a lot of schlepping flats in & out.
Andy P

Edited to say: Don't let your Pepper seedlings get cold, nothing below 43F.
I completely stunted, mine one year. They didn't die, just stopped growing.

This message was edited Apr 30, 2006 8:18 PM

My husband has a great set up for me. Rolling carts with florescent lights for bad days. So i just have to roll the cart out and load them up. It still takes about 10 min, but not too bad.

I do need a cold frame! We are in the process of building a large raised bed garden room right now so there is no time money or energy for more projects. LOL

What i REALLY need is a greenhouse! Maybe next year... Probably not for a few though.

Others are right about peppers. They get "cold-checked." This happened to some of my peppers one year, and although they grew somewhat, they never bloomed or made any peppers. Stokes Seeds recommends not putting out peppers until June 15th. This is up in Canada or in the Northeast.

I have a ton of seedlings too, although only a few peppers. I got some of those mini-greenhouses on wheels from Ace Hardware. Very handy and pretty cheap, $39 apiece. If you push it, they can hold 8 flats each.

The rule I heard was keep the peppers in until the dogwood blossoms fall.

Zeppy, I like time-tables like that, no matter where you are, it works.
My old gardening mentor told me to plant sweet corn when the Oak tree leaves were the size of mouse ears.
He didn't specify which type of Oak and that was before the Super Sweets, LOL.
Andy P

How interesting - I love gardening rules like that! I recently heard around here that you don't plant in the ground (corn they were talking about I think) until after the Blackberry Winter. I asked someone what exactly was the Blackberry Winter and she said that some folks call it the Easter Freeze. I have noticed in the past 3 years that I have been in NE Georgia that there is always a beautiful warm spell in March, and last year I fell for it and planted way too early, then a few days with freezing temps in April.

This year I built a cold frame out of a big wooden crate and some old windows that were replaced when we remodeled the house. It is amazing. My DH calls it the Magic Box. Everything I put in the cold frame has done really well. I didn't lose any plants this year (so far) and last year I lost a high percentage of young sprouts. I put in the tomatoes a couple weeks after the seeds sprouted, yellow squash, pumpkin, cantelope and as soon as I get more room in there I will put in the broccoli and cabbage starts.

By all means, you need to try a cold frame up there. It makes all the difference.

I have learned to wait on Veggies cause all of the warm season vegs I planted 2 years ago were stunted. IE beans, peas, and eggplant when I planted before the soil got warm. I think a thermometer in the wet soil would be a good time to plant. 70F?

That's the reason I bought a soil thermometer.

Sarahskeeper
I was told by a wonderful gardener that you can find Morrell mushrooms in the forest when the oak trees have mouse ears.I love instructions like that.

Well, my plants will be going out in a week or two. When our average lows are in the 40's. Since we are high desert, we have hot days and cool nights. If i waited to put my squash and melons out until the lows were in the 50's it would be the end of July and the days would be in the 90's or higher!

I hope the soil temp is more critical for melons, peppers etc. As long as the tops don't get close to freezing, and the ground is warm ...

Tombaak, I know what you mean about the zone change thing. This moving from a 9b to a 6b and from heavy clay to sand continues to be - uhm, interesting for me too. Peppers and Toms have been sitting on an eastern windowsill with the window open for 3 days & nights now. Night lows on my patch of high desert sand has been 51 this week. I'm gonna plant about 1/4 of both the toms and peppers out this weekend and see what happens. In theory we could still get a hefty chill. It was down to 33 in the open areas a few days last week. Well, even if nothing grows in the veggie garden this year, I am truly happy to be done with living in the suburbs and am trying to enjoy every gusty bit of wind-blown sand out here. Sounds like I am either lower in elevation or south of you or both. Good luck!

Karla, i am at 4300, and west of you. I list my zone as 5, when lots consider it 6. I actually grew up here on a sheep ranch in Dayton, hated it, graduated left for NYC, then San Francisco, Eastern Europe, The Bay Area, and now 15 years later as an adult i returned. LOL I never gardened as a child, so the gardening here part is new, the climate isn't.

We have zone 6 weather 9 out of 10 or even more years, but if you check, the recorded low will be somewhere around 20 degrees below zero! I grew up in a house with only wood stove heat and I remember a year when i was a kid (boy does that make me sound old) that our pipes froze for days and days. Our last frost was June 8th last year, this area is notorious for a late freeze, (that's what remay is for!)

Careful with your plantings, i have lots of marginal stuff, (i am planting for global warming :) But when it comes to big expensive things like trees, i plant conservatively. We had a house a few miles from here that put in a huge (extremely expensive) windbreak of Cypress Lelandii, (zone 6) they looked lovely for many, many years and about 5 years ago now we had a real zone 5 winter and almost everyone of them died. I hadn't moved back yet, but came up to see my mom a few months later and when i drove by that place i felt so sorry for the people! Nurseries have short memories when it comes to weather, lots of them are run by people new to the area also.

With great challenges come great rewards... Gardening in this area is especially rewarding. :)

Melissa