Keep a fan blowing on them for several hours a day (I usually just turn the fan off and on with the lights) to help simulate wind. This will help beef up their stems.

here is a pic of a few of them

I have a carport that stays in full shade 24/7, I usually start putting my seedlings out under that during the day when its 70+ outside, bringing them in at night the first week. Then after that first week I start leaving them out all night (assuming temperatures stay high enough, naturally), do that for another week, then move them to my front porch where they get direct morning sun but afternoon shade for about a week, then they're usually ready to go.

I don't have a specific trigger for moving from the starter cups to the 4" pots. Just when I have time and it feels right.

As the others have said, go slow on hardening them off. Even in shade, wind can be detrimental.
If you have a cardboard box, set your seedlings inside to protect them from the wind but still
allow ambient light.

Josh

Yeah, its early, but I was bored and I have grow lights. =)

this past winter has been VERY mild here in central Texas. I think the temperature only dropped under freezing twice.

Our current temps have been a low of 40 and high of 70. I am sooo tempted to declare, "spring is here", and start planting outdoors.

In this picture are 12 pellets with ghost peppers and another 12 with various tomatoes.

Where can you get the plastic flats? I looked in 2 different stores today, all I found were prefilled flats (I like to use my own starter) and the cardboard ones. I got 100 cardboard cells but I am a bit leery of them since I used some 4" pots made of the same stuff last year and they didn't seem to break down that well in the ground, even after I tore the bottoms off they seemed to constrict growth and I ended up losing some banana peppers. Also afraid they'll fall apart as often as I mist my seedlings.

I get my flats and cells from my local nursery, I think most larger ones stock them. I use 2 trays, 1 tray with holes inside tray without holes so I can bottom water without taking all the cells out to drain, just lift the whole tray with holes out with cells in it.

Yeah, Scott66 that's some nice interior decorating :) Sorry, couldn't resist.

The house my wife and I are renting has a living room and a media room. we don't have the furniture (or need) for 2 living areas so we use the media room as storage.

My wife isn't thrilled about me putting that little setup in there. she thinks I'll get soil and mud everywhere (she's probably right).

a closeup of the bhut's I got from esox07! This picture is about 3 days old, today there were 8 sprouts and I can see more pushing up through the soil. I'm chomping at the bit to move these into pots, but I'll wait for the first true leaves.

Bruce

I thanked them and ran back to the car with a dozen trays with like 30-40 4" cells each before they could change their minds.

This is the size I planted out into the garden last year. A little leggy but
they were strong plants.

Harding off is the hardest part for me. I always burn some of my plants.
Why? Because I forget they are outside. This year I'm going to really
keep any eye on them.

At half that height some of mine had enough roots that I needed to be really gentle, or else allow for the cup shaped root ball when planting them in the ground last week.

I guess its hard to say though without some sense of scale :)

perhaps those are 12 or 16 oz cups.

I see you're fairly near me. I'm in southerastern CT, about 15 minutes north of the Foxwoods casino if you know where that is. I'm one of the more conservative here on this forum, as I start them later. I usually start the annuum varieties around April 1 and the chinense varieties two weeks earlier, about March 15. I start to harden them off when the weather gets real nice, about the second week of May, and transplant around Memorial Day every year. I usually get good fruits starting in late July, and the chinense are even later, usually late August up till frost. I've had some bad luck in the past with setting out too early, where they get cold feet and refuse to grow for a few weeks. That experience has left me a little bit timid about setting out too early. Others here have had good results setting out much earlier, so I could probably get away with it too, but in truth, I'm pretty busy before Memorial Day anyway (I'm a teacher), so it works well for me. Here's an old photo of my peppers about two weeks before transplanting them. This was just before I began to harden them off. It was a good year.

We used to live in Salem, Norwich, and Niantic when we worked in New London (b4 NUWC moved to RI) so I know where Preston is!