When to transplant seedlings

Okay, so the time has come to discuss the transplanting of your little seedlings into larger pots. Doing this right will encourage your seedlings to grow larger and have their stems thicken. Your seedlings need this growth in order to be ready to go in the ground.

Now first, you are not too late if you haven't transplanted your little seedlings yet. You want to get them to the point of transplanting in the next week or so, however.

I just recently transplanted the pumpkin seedlings we have.

Here's what I started with:

One of those pots has 2 pumpkin seedlings and the other has three.

What are the red cups for you ask? They are my larger pots. They are just under 4 inches across and they are nice and deep. I call them perfect pots for seedlings that need to grow up and get ready to go in the ground. Here's how I prepare the cups for dirt and seedlings:

 I just used scissors to poke a couple of holes in the bottom in order to allow for drainage.

Notice also the bag of potting mix in the first picture.

It doesn't technically have potting mix in it. It has compost dirt mixed with regular soil in it. It's a handy bag.

I decided to do this inside because I could sit down and work at chest height, which makes my neck and back more happy then hunching over outside.

So with everything ready, step one was to put a little bit of dirt in the bottom of each new pot. Here:

There's not much dirt in there. Maybe an inch, with a little crater hollowed out in the middle.

Your next step is to remove the seedlings from their pots. If your seedlings have their roots tangled up, it's not a problem. Here's a video showing what you can do. Warning: this is of me so you have to be subjected to my face and voice now.




Now you want to get those seedlings planted firmly in their new pots. Here's a still image of the technique:

You hold the plant up straight in the pot with one hand and with the other hand you arrange soil around the stem. Notice how deep the plants are going in these pots. Here's a video with more detail:



So once you've got all of the dirt in there, just pack it firmly, being careful not to squeeze the seedling's stem. Then water until the water is coming out the bottom.

Then don't water for a few days. I'd say let the top couple of inches get pretty dry. This'll stimulate those roots. After that, water every few days and keep your seedlings in a nice sunny area.

Oh yeah. Be sure to have your assistant label the transplants to keep things straight.



Next time we'll transplant tomato seedlings.

And now for something completely different

Okay, not completely different, but somewhat. I thought it would be nice to take a break and share a narrative I wrote about an early gardening experience I had. It was a, shall we say, learning experience.

It was April and the last snow of the season had come and gone. The back yard of my home in central Utah was beginning to show signs of life, with the green of grass warring with the yellow of budding dandelions. My garden plot was looking good. Really good. I had taken pains to put it to bed properly at the end of the previous season, and I had been planning this year's garden for five months! Five months of sketching designs and plans, layouts and trestles for beans. And now the time was fast approaching.


I turned to my wife. "Hey," I said, all innocent and completely ignorant of the pain I was about to commit myself to, "why don't we plant some corn?"


"Great idea." She squinted in thought. "Is it hard to grow?"


I shrugged. "No way. Everybody does corn."


Three weeks later I was ready. I had tilled the plot again, mixing in some nice steer manure and keeping it watered to get the worms excited. On a perfect, sunny Spring day, with a packet of seeds in hand, I dashed outside and planted four rows of corn in the southern end of the garden. I splashed some water on the five by ten foot area of future cobs and then moved north up the plot to put in some beans and zucchini.


Two weeks later I stared morosely at the bare plot. No corn sprouts. None. No future maize. Glaring at the dirt, then the sky, I asked, "Why?" Nobody answered. I jerked open the shed door and dug through my box of seed packets, finally coming up with the packet of corn seeds. Having only cursorily skimmed the planting instructions, I had not actually read all of the information available. Two lines down, I found the problem: Plant in warm ground in a sunny area.


I looked up and glared again. But this time, I glared at the trees that shaded the southern end of my garden for about six hours of the day. Muttering to myself, "Too early. Planted them too early. Gotta have warm ground," I made my way to my healthy tomato plants and took solace in their rough stems and fuzzy leaves. I broke a leaf off and inhaled that wonderful sharp aroma of the tomato plant's foliage. Recharged, re-energized and renewed, I weeded around my zucchini then went inside.


"Yeah, so we planted that corn in the wrong place," I said, stepping through the back door into my small home. "Needs to be in direct sunlight."


"What do you mean 'We'?" my wife asked, grinning at me.


I muttered something witty and rude and stalked off to the kitchen, in search of a drink of water. "Yeah, well we'll give it some time. Maybe as it warms up and stuff it'll grow okay."


My wife, Annemarie, gave me a hug. "You'll make it work." She loves that I love to garden. She enjoys it too, but she allows my seasonal obsession to run amok and she enjoys the fruits of said obsession. "Besides, we're in Utah. It's sunny here."


With greater hope, I was back outside every day of the next week, checking for sprouts. It was on a Thursday that it happened. I was sure it wasn't grass. The shape was wrong and it was too far away from the edge of the lawn. "A sprout!" I hollered, bringing my kids running and my wife walking: she was carrying the baby.


"Yay!" my two oldest boys shouted. "Corn sprouts!"


And it was true. There were several tender green shoots poking out of the tough Utah soil. I was elated. We were gonna have corn!


Two months later we were giddily eating raw green beans, raw peas, fresh zucchini and yellow squash, and were pretty sure our pumpkins were going to be big. But the corn stalks were two feet, maybe three feet, high. No sign of the fuzz that comes out the top for pollinating. No sign at all. And the stalks were thin and the roots were visible at the base of the stem. I had no idea what to do.


Then it happened. I came home from work on a blustery day that promised rain. I was beaming at the cloudy heavens, pleased that the sky was going to water for me. I walked in the front door, kicking off my boots and settling into my prized blue easy chair. My two oldest boys came dashing up. I held out my arms for hugs and kisses, but they stopped short, their eyes wide.


"Dad," my oldest boy, Thomas, intoned, "bad news." He was a well-read six and an oldest brother, both of which he took seriously.


His younger brother, Hintze, nodded in agreement. "Bad news!"


"The corn fell down," Thomas said.


Heat and cold tingles fought over my spine and face. "What?" I yelped, my voice cracking. I leapt to my feet, dashed through the house and flung the back door open wide. "No," I whispered. It was true. My small field of light-emerald, three-and-a-half feet high corn was leaning. No, more than leaning. Some of the stalks were practically horizontal. Slipping my feet into my work shoes, I hurried to the corn.


"See?" It was Thomas, coming up behind me, "It fell down. The wind did it."


I nodded, numb. But, never one to give up, I set to feverish action. I waded gently into the garden, my hands tenderly lifting each corn stalk back to its vertical position. The wind blew. The corn fell again. I cursed the wind and straightened my corn plants again, daring the wicked southwestern gusts to come again. They did; the corn fell. Muttering dire imprecations for all things stormy, I strode to my storage shed. My gardening twine in hand, I (seriously) gently roped each and every stalk up, tying the rows to firm anchors on each end. Now the wind blew impotently. My corn was going to live! It was going to thrive! It would provide loads of delicious, nourishing staple food for my family!


By the end of August, it was clear my corn would provide very little, if any, delicious, nourishing staple food for my family. The tallest stalk in my tiny field reached no higher than my neck, fuzz and all. Small nubs were growing here and there on the healthiest of the plants, but they were not developing well. In the end, we got five little cobs. Kernels had formed over maybe seventy percent of the cobs' body.


But I couldn't believe that this disaster was due only to insufficient sunlight. As a regularly successful gardener, I knew that sunlight was vital, but my corn looked well, malnourished. It looked like I was promised I would look if I drank coffee as a kid: stunted.


I read the back of the seed packet again. Plant in warm ground in a sunny area. The crumpled packet also informed that the corn would be ready for harvest in eighty-two days. It further informed me that the seed company had a long tradition of good seeds. But it did not explain why my corn looked like it had been on a forty day fast.


It turned out that my corn had indeed been on a fast. A forced fast. A fast caused by my ignorance; one caused by my eagerness to plant and unwillingness to study and learn about my crops before I planted them. I wound up asking a garden club I had just begun attending if they had any idea why my corn had been such a spectacular failure. The patron of the club smiled, not at all condescendingly really, and asked me if I had used nitrogen.


"Nitrogen?"


"Corn is basically a fruitful grass," he rumbled. "Grass absolutely needs nitrogen. You can get nitrogen pellets at the seed shop."


"Nitrogen?"


He nodded, taking a bite from a club member's home grown apple. "You've gotta have it. Otherwise, your corn won't come out."


"Nitrogen." Embarrassed at my ignorance, I buried my face in a plate of blueberry cobbler.


So what did my garden teach me? After long days of staring at bare ground and then obsessively urging my puny stalks to grow? Followed by weeks of wishing the corn cobs would finally form and thinking that corn was supposed to be taller, wasn't it? My garden taught me to look before I leap. To take a few minutes and get educated about what I am planting. My garden taught me to ask around and to talk to people in the area who have experience with vegetable gardens.


You know what? My garden also taught me that gardening is also about community.

I know I said I'd discuss chickens

but I think it would be a better thing to talk about compost today. I will try to get to chickens tomorrow. I also hope to have a guest blogger in the next couple of days. Exciting!


So on to composting.


Garbage dumps smell. So do landfills. This is probably the case because these places are full of the rotting waste and detritus of thousands of people. If you’re looking for motivation to compost, you might try taking a walk around one of these blights on the landscape. Then it might also help to know that when most families start composting, the volume of garbage that they produce is reduced by about 30%.

So if you’re just hoping to reduce your impact on the environment, composting is a great way to go. But if you’re also looking for a cost-effective, relatively easy, and ultimately educational way to get great fertilizer and dirt, composting tops the list of things you can do.

Whether you live in a condo with no yard, a townhome with less than 100 square feet of lawn space, a house with a nice-sized back yard, or anything in between, you can compost. In other words, no matter what your living situation, you can compost. To learn about composting, you could Google ‘compost’ and quickly become overwhelmed by the myriad resources available. In doing this, you could also learn about thermophilic microorganisms, and mycorrhizae. But why would you complicate things when composting is actually an incredibly simple process?

See, the thing is that when plants grow, they take in carbon dioxide from the air and nutrients and water from the earth. Then when they die, they naturally decompose and return those elements and materials back to the earth. So the truth is that when we compost, we are simply taking part in a natural process that has been going on for millions of years. Thus, in order for us to be able to compost and take advantage of the multitudinous benefits of doing so, we just need to imitate nature.

There are plenty of methods and approaches to composting, but they can basically be summed up into two categories: closed container and piles.

Closed Container

Modern closed containers look essentially like barrels propped on their sides on a stand. These barrels have an opening through which organic materials, such as vegetable and garden leavings, are placed into the container. With that opening sealed closed, the barrel is rotated on its axis, combining old materials with the newer materials. These containers also have air vents.

Closed containers work well because they obey the three principles of good composting: stirring, air and shade. When you rotate the barrel, you stir the materials, thus eliminating noxious fumes that might build up under layers of inert plant material. Air is necessary because it helps the plant material break down. Shade keeps things from drying out, which is necessary because moisture also enables the process of decomposition.

Barrel composters come in a variety of sizes. The urban composter who specializes in indoor or container gardening can actually get a composter that they can put on their kitchen counter. Usually coming in an attractive shade of green, these small composters, if used correctly, will keep even the most sensitive of noses happy.

You can also find container composters that vary in size from four feet to six feet tall. Some of these composters are designed to create a wonderful organic tea that is full of nutrients. This type of composter works in much the same way as other container composters, but they have a way for the fluids that are produced through the process of decomposition to seep out and get caught in a tray. Some of these composters can hold up to four gallons of nutrient-filled liquid.

Make a pile

If you’ve got some space in your yard, making a compost pile can be the easiest and most straightforward way to get your compost going. To make a compost pile, you need to find a relatively shady area in your yard. If you can find a shady spot that also gets hit by your regular lawn watering, you will be in business.

With your compost spot chosen, all you need to do now is collect your grass and leaves, as well as your organic kitchen waste and then deposit all of this on your spot. You can even add egg shells and bread leavings to this pile. Then keep it moist. Wait two weeks before doing anything, making sure you are consistent with adding organic materials to the pile.

After two weeks, use a pitchfork to turn the pile over. Your objective here is two-fold: get air into the pile and move the top layers to the middle of the pile. You should, after these first two weeks, have some nicely decomposing organic material that is black and moist-looking. If you have kept your compost pile wet, you should also see quite a few healthy worms in your pile as you turn it over. Worms are your friends; they help break down the organic material into delicious dirt for your garden.

Your compost pile doesn’t need to cover much ground, and this can be helped if you put a containing frame around it. This can be done using 1”x6” boards as retaining walls. Of course, if you really want to make a fancy compost, and you have plenty of space, you can use the increasingly popular three-tiered system. 

Here's a helpful image: 

This system utilizes three different sections, numbered 1, 2 and 3. Number 1 is the farthest to the right, where you place your fresh organic waste. If you keep it all wet, in two to three weeks you can turn the material in number 1 over into number 2. Then a few weeks later you can move the fully decomposed material into number 3 by sifting it through a wire mesh. The compost waits in number 3 for you to put it to use. 

Notice in the first picture that there is a shelf-looking thing across the top of #3, but in the next image it is across #2. It is hinged. When you sift material through it into #3, big chunks are often left behind. Simply swing the mesh shelf over to #2 to dump the chunks back. 

You might be intrigued by the three-tiered system, and this is fine. But all you really need to remember if you want to start composting is that anyone can do it. Whether you use a low-cost container composter in your home, a large barrel in your backyard or a compost pile, you will be able to reap the myriad benefits of making your own compost.