Hardening off

An unusually warm April day (22 degrees, I'd swear I've been through whole months of British summer when it never reached those heady heights) prompted me to think I should start hardening off my seedlings from the shed. Well, actually it prompted me to think that my seedlings might die in the scorching temperatures the shed reaches in sunshine, making me think I should probably take them out of it so they survive, and then I remembered I was supposed to be hardening them off too, so I thought I'd kill two birds with one stone.

It turns out that today might not have been an ideal day for that. It might have been a bit too hot and sunny, as some websites I read recommended starting them off on a cloudy day in a sheltered position in the garden and only for a few hours at a time. So where did I put them?

Why on the path in direct sunshine with a fair wind blowing, of course, although I did get nervous and take them back into the shed after a couple of hours in the end.

My courgette seedlings seem not to have been too pleased with me and started looking rather droopy, especially the one whose stem I accidentally bashed when its toilet-roll pot extension fell over. Most of them seem much better now they've had time to recover in the shed though. I won't be trying my toilet toll trick again next year if I can find the pots for long roots that I saw Monty Don with on the telly (I can't work out how to Google them, mind, so it may be toilet rolls for my seedlings again).

Anyhow, to try and avoid my seedlings expiring of heat exhaustion, I left the shed door open after I'd put them back in and propped cardboard up over part of the windows to protect them a bit. This seemed to be OK for them and I haven't had any definite seedling deaths yet (although one of my peas looks none too happy). Still, there's always tomorrow, when I get to try again and have to decide whether I'm prepared to carry them all to a properly protected part of the garden or whether laziness will prevail and they'll be sitting on the path again. I am torn. Laziness is a strong pull, but then, I really don't want my seedlings to die after all that work I've put into them - especially as it's already taken them a month to get as big as they have, so if I they die I'm back to square one at a much later time of the year.