Hardening Off: Not Nearly As Fun As the Name Implies

So hardening off sucks. It takes patience and I have none, so it is not a task for which I am well suited. Add to that that I have a day job, and it gets even more tricky. But the fact is, it has to be done. Seedlings started indoors are accustomed to 14-16 hours a day of artificial light, which is considerably weaker than the sun's rays (6-8 hours is considered full sun). If you just throw those poor guys out in full sun, they will get burned beyond repair and all your hard work coaxing them to germinate and then not die will be for nothing. Because they will die. I heard somewhere that hardening off is 90% about acclimating seedlings to the sun and 10% wind/temperature.

So for the first 3 days I put the dudes out at 8am on the west side of the house, where they would get very little, if any, direct sunlight. My roommate was charged with bringing them in before he went to work in the early afternoon. After a few days it was time to get working on UV tolerance, so I placed all the seedlings in a clear plastic crate and put them in the sun with the lid mostly closed for 4 hours a day. It's been 4 days of hardening off phase two, and the seedlings are starting to look strong and happy.

I'd like to get them up to a couple of hours of direct unfiltered sunlight, but the Bay Area weather sucks balls this week. All we are getting is rain, rain and more fucking rain. And it's June. Total bullshit. So I am currently debating whether some of the plants are ready to go in the ground after a week of haphazard hardening off. There shouldn't be very much sun this next week (thanks a lot mother nature), so I'm hoping they would survive. My garden is really starting to fill up, so it's a good thing that I already planned to have 3 tomato plants in the ground. The rest will have to be planted in various containers (keg buckets, large planters, the aforementioned clear crate with holes drilled throught the bottom) or gifted away.