It looks like it’s going to be one of THOSE years. For the last 10 years I’ve been blessed with great May weather for hardening off my plants. I think that streak is about to end. The forecast is looking a little dicey for the next 5 days. There are lots of chances for rain, but it’s the severe storms predicted this weekend that will really throw a wrench into things. I’ll be monitoring the weather radar like a hawk because it takes some time to move 45 flats of plants from their little pop-up greenhouses in the backyard to our safer screen porch.
I get overly-protective of my seedlings after spending months nurturing them. One year I even brought all the flats into the living room during a dangerous storm because I was afraid that the porch could be damaged by high winds.
I would’ve started hardening off the plants a few days ago, but we went from highs in the upper 70s last week to highs in the 50s this week with a chance of nighttime frost. The porch temperature stays only a few degrees above the ambient temperature, so I didn’t want to take any chances.
Yesterday I finally brought all the plants up from the basement because some of them just couldn’t wait any longer. I start my tall zinnias at the same time every year, but for some reason this year’s batch decided to grow twice as fast. The plants are crashing into the lights, and I can’t raise the lights any higher.
They are not as floppy as they could be at that height because I’ve been giving them regular “fan therapy.” I don’t deal well with floppy things. In fact in early April I tossed all my calendula seedlings because they just wouldn’t stand up straight. Every time I tried to water them I would accidentally chop off leaves or even the tops of the plants as I slid the plant trays back and forth. Eventually I couldn’t take the carnage any more and ditched them for good.
Thankfully the tall zinnias are the only plants that are misbehaving. The rest are just eager to be freed from their tiny growing packs and released into the garden. If the weather cooperates, that will happen sometime next week.
Here are some photos I took just before introducing them to sunshine for the first time.
Celosia ‘Chinatown’:
Coleus ‘Kong Rose’:
Salvia ‘Mojave’:
