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Poor Hardening Off

FireEater101

FireEater101

Alrighty so I will start off and say that this is the first year that I started my garden from seeds indoors this past January. After having great germination success and nursing the seedlings to multiple sets of leaves and a nice beautiful green color I believe I just made a pretty significant misstep along the way....hardening off!!! I don't believe I did a very good job of hardening off the large portion of my pepper plants that I planted last Saturday. After about three days most of the pepper leaves turned white/silver and after a strong wind on Tuesday most all of the leaves were stripped off of the plants leaving just the stalk sticking out of the ground. The stalk even still this morning is nice and green. The long and the short here is basically is there any hope for these plants? As I stated most of them have been reduced to just there main stalk with no leaves but still is green as of this morning. Just wondering if these will slowly develop back leaves and maybe produce some peppers. If they don't well I will be reduced to no super hots and just Cap Annums that I planted the week before. Here are a few pics I took earlier this week to give you an idea. If these are most likely goners then I will just say being my first year I have lived and learned. Thanks for the direction.
Mike

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My hardening off process sorta went like this:

Day 1 Put plants out on screen in porch around 3pm for a couple of hours

Day 2 Put them back out again around 3pm for about 3-4 hours

Day 3 Put them back out again on porch for about 3-4 hours

Day 4 I left them out for the remainder of the evening about 5-6 hours 3pm till dark

Day 5 I put them back out around 3pm and left them overnight the following morning I planted them all.

I probably rushed them out is my honest opinion and tried to work it into my weekly work schedule. All of my hardening off was done using my porch as a sun screen. I never really hardening them in direct sunlight and unfortunately my yard has no tree cover to block the sun. We have had a good many sunny days with little clouds this past week.
 
How much sun on your porch? My plants go onto my front porch and stay out there for 7-10 days. They get direct sun from 3-4 till dark and are ready to go after that. If you do not get direct sun on your porch you didnt really harden them at all.
 
millworkman said:
How much sun on your porch? My plants go onto my front porch and stay out there for 7-10 days. They get direct sun from 3-4 till dark and are ready to go after that. If you do not get direct sun on your porch you didnt really harden them at all.
Click to expand...

Makes perfect sense to me. My porch faces east and by 3-4 the sun has passed to the west over my house. I guess I didn't really harden them off at all then...well live and learn...if by some miracle them come back I won't complain but I won't expect that and hey now I know for next year. At least I still have about 35 Jalapenos, Cayennes, Serranos that are looking good. Thanks for the feedback Joyner and Mill!!

MIke
 
Shitty dude. Hope they come back for you, try to shade them a little bit until you see them start coming back. Good luck
 
From my experience coming back from having to hack a whole grow-space down to nubs like that (trying to salvage after TS Debbie spread BS throughout my main space) - focus on feeding and improving the root zone and be patient ...
 
They'll come back from it, they've just been set back a bit. The leaves can all be hacked off a plant repeatedly and it'll be fine, it's just not going to do much growing.
 
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