It’s time to bean up….grow some beans!! I like to start as many baby plants as I can indoors before the growing season begins, to give them ideal conditions to set up their root system. I can regulate everything about their early life and in my mind, that is growing a stronger plant. My kitchen table is completely inundated with baby plants all over the place. This creates the wiggle room for errors I have talked so much about. If plants don’t grow or thrive when first planted, there is usually time to try again for a baby plant.

I have multiple nurseries with many different kinds of plants does create an issue early on that you may have to address. Different types of baby plants grow at different rates, meaning some will be much bigger than others. Some won’t grow at all and you’ll have to start them again from scratch. You can put them in the same nursery, but they won’t catch up to the others. Beans will always tower over tomatoes from an early age. It’s just the way they are. But in the gardening world, every baby plant that’s started indoors has to go through a graduation process we call “Hardening Up”.

To harden up a baby plant is a necessary process to get it ready for life outdoors. If you start a seed outdoors, it has to be tough from the moment it pops out from the soil. It is subject to whatever harshness that nature has to offer. Indoors offers a safe and reliably controlled environment in which to start your seeds, which is why so many more seeds will successfully germinate (start to grow) indoors. But before you simply take your baby pots outdoors, you must let them spend a little time out there to get used to the elements. Varying temperatures and humidity can shock a baby plant and as crazy as this sounds, so can the sun. Baby plants up to this point have had their UV experience through the safety of a window, even when the sun was shining on them. And they were always right around 70 degrees. This is not the cozy environment they are going to be planted into. Rain, wind, ranges of temperatures and humidity will all play a part in their new home and there will be days the sun will literally roast them. Think of it like being at the beach….it takes time to sunburn. But somehow there are people that can spend the whole summer there and turn out a deep and golden tan. Given enough exposure, you can harden up to just about anything. So can baby plants!!

So start sizing up those baby plants to see if any are ready to spend some time outdoors. Start them out small, and hour a day for a few days, then two hours a day for a few days. Gradually build them up to spending a majority of the day outside. Once that happens, you will have successfully hardened them up and they will be ready to plant outdoors. But first, baby steps for baby plants. 💜🌱💜