How to Transplant Seedlings in Organic Gardening

In this video we discuss how to make your own organic garden, and about transplanting seedlings.

Hi! I am Tim MacWelch of Earth Connection School of Wilderness Survival and Ancient Skills in Fredericksburg, Virginia. This is our video series on Organic Gardening. In this clip, we're are going to transplant some seedlings. In the previous clip, you saw me sow seeds into a flat. Once those seeds come up and grow for a month or a month-and-a-half or two months depending on what type of seed it is, and how big it needs to be before it's ready to go in the ground, once that time has elapsed, then they are ready to be transplanted. I've dug small holes in my garden bed, that I've prepared, it's all tilt up, leveled out, fertilized, ready to go. I have dug small holes on 12-inch intervals in a triangular pattern, or looking at it long ways a diagonal pattern. The purpose of this spacing pattern is to grow the plants to their full size, but under close proximity to each other. This minimizes the amount of weeds that can grow, because as my food grows, it provide shade on the soil, thus shading out a lot of the weeds. So those weeds are stunted because of the shadow that they are under, and less weeds means less competition with your vegetables for water and fertilizer. So by packing the seedlings tight in this type of spacing, we can actually quadruple our yield versus traditional long rows of single plants in a row with a walkway in between each one. So to transplant our little seedlings, we're going to simply take a tray of our little seedlings, push from the bottom, you can squeeze it a little bit or push at it, to free up the roots and soil from the package, and very carefully, we're going to place this little guy, down in the hole that we dug, and backfill with loose soil. Any clods or rocks can be thrown away at this point. The clods can be broken up, the rocks can go in the rock bucket. So once we've planted our little seedlings, we're going to give them a long drink of water. Ideally, if you can plant your seedlings in the evening, they will suffer less transplant shock. Once you've taken them out of their package and put them in a new environment, sometimes they will suffer transplant shock and they wilt and fall over, and look very terrible and look very sad. Most of the time, they will bounce back from being transplanted, but if we transplant in the evening, we'll have a little bit of time overnight for the plants to get use to the new surroundings, and they will be less likely to go into transplant shock, which mean that they wilt and look terrible. But again, most of the time they bounce back. So that's how to transplant our seedlings. In our next clip, we're going to show you how to do some organic weed control.