When should I plant out into the garden my pepper, toms, courgette and pumpkin plants

JodyBPM

As the title says!

They are all currently indoors on the windowsill, potted on from their original seed trays into 6" or so pots.

Peppers are currently about 2" high, toms around 6-8" high and courgettes and pumpkins around 4" high. I could do with regaining my windowsills, and would like to get them into the garden, but I'm worried they might still be too young and tender?

They will all be going directly into beds, rather than containers.

What do you reckon? Can I chance it yet, or should I give them another week or two? The peppers especially look too little to me! But I want to give them plenty of time in the garden where they will have more space to grow!

I'm in the SE where the weather is generally milder, although its piddling down with rain here today!

Thanks

bottlehalffull

They should be eased into it gently.

Put them out during the day and then put them under shelter at night ... until you leave them out all night...
It should in theory be ok to put them out now but if they've never been exposed to the wind and rain it'll be a bit of a shock... the idea is to break them into it gently.

Primrose

Your peppers are certainly too small at the moment even though it's normally safe to put all of these plants outside during the first week in June when the danger of night frosts is usually past.Best to wait until they're established plants, around 6 inches high at least. If it's the first time you've grown peppers, they will normally fare better planted in large (10 inch) diameter pots with good compost and a few chicken manure pellets mixed in with it than they will do planted out into the soil. I've tried both methods and my soil planted peppers gave poor results compared with those I planted out into pots with much lower yields. They might have done better if I'd dug bigger holes for them and filled them with bagged compost so the roots had nicer material in which to grow.

Your tomatoes will probably now be OK if they're planted out in a sunny sheltered spot once the rain has finished. . Do you have any empty jumbo mineral water bottles you can cut the bases off to use as cloches if a sudden cold night is forecast.

I'd give the courgettes/pumpkins another week indoors at least. Could you put them all on a tea tray, moving themoutdoors during the daytime and bringing them in at night for this time to gently harden them off? They will adjust much better to the shock of planting out permanently if you can do this. If young plants get checked by cold nights after the shock of planting out it takes them a long time to recover and their yields can often drop considerably so it's worth being patient for another week.

bottlehalffull

I was planning on keeping my peppers in the greenhouse - but have grown them in the past on windowsills. Although they take up a lot of room.

JodyBPM

Thanks! So I will keep them inside a wee while longer and start hardening them off!

I'm interested in your comments about peppers doing better in containers! I've done them in containers previously, and they've always been very small with small fruits, and thats why I was planning to put them directly into beds, so that they would have more space to grow! I'll make sure I put plenty of good quality compost in around them when I put them in, and see if that helps. I was planning to intersperse them with the toms in a long bed that runs directly in front of the house, which gets full sun and is of course somewhat protected by being directly in front of the house.