Gardening: Transplanting — from one pot to another

Now that your seedlings are a good size, with well more than two sets of leaves, it’s time to move them ahead to their next step, a larger container. If you used those little disks, this is a piece of cake. Choose a small pot, make sure there’s ample soil (at least an inch or two at the bottom) and place your disk on top. Then fill in the sides with fresh potting soil to the top of the disk.

Try not to make either of two possible mistakes. The first is to leave air pockets anywhere in the soil. You don’t want the roots to dry out and they will if they reach dead air. So make sure you’ve firmed the soil carefully. The second is to allow any new soil to gather around the plant’s crown, the place where the stem emerges from the soil. This is sacred ground. If you pile fresh soil around the crown, it will rot. As in goodbye, plant.

If you used the plastic trays of squares instead of the disks, this job is a little harder. I use a sharp scissor and simply cut away at least one side of the plastic holder and slide the seedling out as gently as possible. If you’ve purchased seedlings, they’re most likely in this type of holder. Squeezing the sides of the little squares will help, but again, gently. I water mine before moving them because I think the soil holds together when wet better than when dry.

Put some soil in the base of the new pot and firm more soil against one side. Put your little square in, hold it firmly against the soil on the side of the pot and then fill in the remaining space carefully, leaving no air pockets.

You may well note, if you’ve purchased seedlings, especially those with long flowering times like impatiens, that the roots are bunched heavily at the base of the plant. Your impulse may  be not to interfere with this state of affairs but that would be yet another mistake — this condition is called “root-bound.”

Those roots will not grow and the plant will have to send out further root growth through the sides rather than in a downward direction. This translates into more time, less bloom. And if they’re really bunched, like a half-inch thick or even more, just pull them off and throw them away, leaving the bottom of the plant free and open. One of my nearest and dearest keeps a mental list of gardening facts that she thinks of as “counter-intuitive.” This is one of them. She was really surprised the first time she saw me do this, realizing that for years she had always been careful to do exactly the opposite!

Now you can hold your babies in place until you’re ready to move them to their final destination, whether this be a bed, a window box, a larger, beautiful decorative pot or all three.

Next week, we might start reviewing annuals, since many are already on sale.