Hi, John Lenz from Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Company here with you again today.
We're in greenhouse number four and I want to talk to you for for a few
moments about hardening off your transplants. Now you've seeded your
tomatoes, cucumbers, whatever and you've got germination and emergence and the
plants are looking beautiful and it's time to think about setting them outside.
You want to make sure that they're ready for the conditions they're going to
encounter outside. Remember your first sunburn? You went outside and played in
the sun for too long at once and you got sunburned. The plants can suffer the same
fate, so a week before you're ready to put them out, take them outside, put them
under the patio umbrella, put them in the shade, put them someplace where they're
not gonna get direct sunlight and let them acclimatize to the amount of light
they're gonna be faced with when they go outside. If it's not gonna freeze or
frost at night, you can probably leave them outside to let them get used to the
idea of the temperature fluctuations they're going to encounter. So in order
to have successful transplanting, make sure your plants are hardened off. Give
them a week, maybe ten days, whatever you're comfortable with, to get used to
the increased light levels and to get used to the temperature fluctuations
they're going to encounter in your garden. Hardening off doesn't vary that
much between species or genus of plants, it's just a matter of, in the early
spring, if you're getting your lettuce ready to go out or your brassicas, then
you want to get them ready by just increasing the light levels. If it's a
June and your tomatoes are ready to go, or mid-May, just make sure that they're
ready for the light changes. These are all trial cucumbers. I have a six pack
of each; we're gonna put six varieties over in number eight
and let them grow. Basically we're here transplanting. This is the soil we have.
It's been compost amended, roto-tilled last week; it's ready to go, so we're
gonna transplant in this Natsu Fushinara, which is CU 113 in the
Baker Creek Catalog. I like to call this the two-finger method of transplanting.
We'll pull the seedling out of the six pack. There's the root development. You
should have a pretty decent tight ball. These were seeded 12/27 so there are 12
days old. Make your hole, drop your seedling in at ground level; try not to
disturb the root ball any more than necessary, and give her a little cover up,
and tag them. Tag them so you know what you got. Here's a little hint: if you've got to chip a hole in the ground to get your plants in you need to work on your soil.
The original Missouri soil that we're blessed with here is about half rock and
half clay. It's rather thick, doesn't drain well, stays wet too long, so we
bring in compost and probably amend it 50-50. We'll put three inches of
compost on top of it and then till three inches into the native soil, remove the
rock and then have a 50/50 blend. So it's clay with a pretty good amount - you can
see that this remains of the sticks and the bark and the other sort of things
that we're using in our compost blend.
Well I've got six different varieties of cucumbers planted in here, transplanted
in here. Each one has been tagged with their seed date, their variety and
everything else. Michelle makes me shut off the fans when we come in to do these
videos and I wanted to show you what the temperature was in this greenhouse
currently. So as soon as we're done here I'm turning the fans back on. What did I
forget? Good! It's a little warm. Let me get over here.
Hey everyone this is Shannie from Baker Creek. Thanks so much for watching this
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