Hardening Off Seedlings etc.

Several years ago I had the pleasure of touring Pat Scolnik's tissue culture lab, Breeze Hill Farm.
 
It's much more difficult to harden off small tissue culture explants than it is seedlings.
 
Pat had a real interesting technique. She had plastic domes that covered her flats that allowed her to go from full dome cover to domes that had a few holes in them to domes that had more holes in them to domes that had lots of holes in them and finally to no dome at all. 
 
It was a real neat system and Pat was using it on hundreds of flats of hosta tissue culture liners. Pat was using this system to root stage four plantlets(just leaf....and no roots) and was rooting stage four hosta into promix like soil Vs. the regular agar medium used in tc labs for stage four rooting. She said her losses were a little higher but it eliminated a whole stage in the hosta tc process.
 
If you use the regular size greenhouse flats the plastic domes are cheap and it's easy to afford many domes for different ventilation levels.
 
Dan & Lu
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