Our next video is officially out! Since we’re just barely escaping freezing temperatures here in the Interior, it’s finally time for us to move into the next phase of our gardening! Getting outside!
In this video, we provide you an overview of how we start to phase our plants into the outdoors. Getting your plants outside really benefits them since the sun is the best grow light we can possibly get! Plus, it can save you a bit of power by allowing you to turn off your grow lights throughout the shoulder season. This is one of the ways in which we have great, healthy plants that are “rearing to go” when we finally get them in the ground.
Even if you don’t have a heated greenhouse like we do, your seed grown plants will still benefit from early hardening off and spending some of their time in the outdoors. Before we had our greenhouse, we would often bring our plants outside for several hours a day, or even more depending on what we could do. When overnight lows are expected to at least be in the high 30’s, cold hardy plants can essentially “live outside” and only need to be brought in when overnight conditions warrant. This can be extended into frost sensitive plants like tomatoes, but we generally prefer 42-45 degree lows for them when possible. Our peppers have a hard cut off of 50 degree lows and that’s super important. Except for peppers, you can absolutely push these temperature guidelines a little bit, just be aware you’re flirting closer to the “danger zone” at that point. As always, be vigilant for cold stress and bring your plants inside if you see it.
In our opinion, the early shoulder season offers a lot of great outdoor growing time for your plants. Being “seasonally aware” for your garden plants can really give you a great growing edge. We often find that the 2-3 weeks prior to last frost will support outdoor growing almost 100%, with only “freak” frost threats (and hail/snow/etc) we have to deal with. This becomes more and more true the closer to last frost we get. Sure, you do have to do a bit of plant shuffling if you don’t have a heated greenhouse, but the benefits are worth it. Plus, anytime you can turn off those indoor grow lights will save you a little bit of money.
We are finding this whole “just in time” video production pretty demanding, but we are so far glad we decided to add video into our mix! If you haven’t done so all ready, we’d love it if you sub’d to our YouTube channel! Thanks for watching.
