Am I ahead?

[green fingers]

Reading all the posts I get the feeling my veggies are ahead of everyone else. I think I planted them out too early as I have Toms, peppers, peas 2 varieties, lettuce, carrots 2 varieties, strawberries and mellons (in the greenhouse) all in the garden where they have been for a few weeks now.

They seem to be doing OK. They all have flowers (obviously the carrots and lettuce don't) and the toms have fruits, but I am wondering if I have done any damage by planting them out too early. Will it effect the cropping?

Or has everyone got their plants in the soil now and I'm just reading things wrong?

Wendy.

[DunDiggin]

Everything is relative and depends on where you're located, especially with the weather we've been having this year. If you'd been in the Vale of York or Scotland the frost of the last week would have killed everything.
I've had brassica's out for the last 6 weeks, but its a mixed bag. Some of those I planted out 2 weeks ago are now the same size as the ones planted earlier because the low temperatures mean that the early plantings don't grow very fast. It's the same with my Mangetout, and my latest batch of runnerbeans started in rootrainers when I planted the first lots out 3 weeks ago will soon match them in size.
Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. If it does you get an earlier crop, which may mean you miss having the crop spoilt by disease or pests, otherwise they should crop as normal, as long as the varible weather doesn't kill them.

[green fingers]

Thanks for that, you've reasured me.

I'm in the southeast, on the coast, and the warm weather over the past month prompted me to plant out my seedlings. Everything has done really well. I thought the weather must be on the upturn and being near the coast we get a lot of breeze so I thought it would be a safe bet there wouldn't be any frost.

I have put fleece over twice just in case but it wasn't nessasary in the end. Better safe than sorry though.

Wendy.

[valerie k]

I'm in the south east too and I've had lots of stuff outside for quite a while, I've got flowers on my tomatoes and strawberries (and fuchsias etc.) so I can only assume that they are OK. Fingers crossed Wendy but I think we'll be OK, the weather has been quite warm here and we've had to water every night until last night when we actually got rain. I shouldn't worry, I think you'll just get your crops a bit earlier.

Valerie