There was frost on the grass when I woke up yesterday morning, and today the high is supposed to soar into the mid-80s—a more-than-50-degree temperature swing in a little over 24 hours. Welcome to spring in Wisconsin! I don’t know if we’ll be threatened with frost again in the next week or so, but despite that scary unknown I decided to bring up all my plants from the basement yesterday to start hardening them off.
My pop-up greenhouses hold heat quite well, so even though the temperatures were only in the 40s when I set out my plants yesterday morning, the temperature inside the greenhouses was already much higher. Of course on a hot day like today I will need to monitor my tender plants very carefully because the temperature inside the greenhouses could easily soar into the triple digits and cook them to death.
Thankfully the greenhouses are very versatile, and there are many flaps I can adjust to keep the air circulating.
I should know better than to base my seed-starting dates on the weather from the previous year, but that’s what I did this year. I started everything a week or so early and as a result my plants are much larger than usual.
I was getting a little stressed when April and early May were so unusually chilly. What if my plants got too big for the grow lights before it was warm enough to introduce them to the outside world? Thankfully the extended forecast looks promising, but next winter I’m going back to my regular seed-starting schedule just to be safe.
If all goes according to plan, I’ll start planting my annuals in my flowerbeds sometime late next week.