My first Friday Fail will have to be from last season.
May 10, 2021
I had read all the books I could. I watched every YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook video available. I listened to countless podcasts.
I was ready to get these seedlings in the ground already!
If your dining room table looked like this wouldn’t you want them out of your house?
I knew I needed to harden them off and I needed to do it slowly. So I started in the middle of April. My hope and intention was that by Mother’s Day weekend the temperatures would reach the right numbers and I could transplant each of these into the ground.
I took each of those 19 trays in and out of the back door once (and eventually twice) per day. I gradually increased the amount of time like I had read. I started them in a shady spot like I watched. And I covered the more vulnerable seedlings like I had heard.
It wasn’t enough. The 3-4 days leading up to Mother’s Day weekend were very windy and stormy. Not the ideal weather conditions that one wants when hardening off immature plants. So I decided the best thing to do was keep them inside. They were pretty hardy at this point. Or so I thought.
I planted them on Mother’s Day weekend. Not all of them because I just didn’t have the time. The others I planted the next weekend. I needed them off of my table. Because, again, it looked like this.
It did not go well.
My poor, baby, sun-loving peppers got scorched. The pictures I’m going to show you might not look bad but I only took pictures from the very beginning of the scald. I was too upset to take pictures later.
You might be thinking to yourself, “Wow, overreacting much?” And you’re right, I was. Especially since, Spoiler alert: All but two bounced back into healthy, productive plants.
At the time I was extremely upset because I thought that all of the work I had done babying these pepper and tomato plants was wasted. And even though it did turn out just fine, if my husband and I hadn’t shielded these seedlings with a shade cloth for the next two weeks or so, these would have been goners.
So what did I learn? Well, lots of things but mainly:
1. Plants are way more resilient than I gave them credit for.
2. Just because you think your plants are ready to be transplanted, doesn’t mean they don’t need extra protection when they finally go in the ground.
3. I should maybe wait to see how my plants do after transplanting before I give away all my extras…
Here’s to an even better year filled with lots of these.
