The Care and Feeding of Transplants

Always harden off transplants for eight to ten days before you set them out in the garden. Expose them to short, then gradually longer periods outdoors. (If you purchase transplants, find out if they’ve been hardened off. If not, make sure you do it.)

If seedlings are in flats, slice the roots into squares with a knife about a week before transplanting. Repeat the process before removing from flat.

Feed transplants with fish emulsion the day before setting them out. If possible, transplant on a cloudy or drizzly day. Or set out seedlings in the late afternoon or early evening. It’s more comfortable for you, and the plants will thrive without requiring shade or constant watering.

If seedlings are in peat pots, be sure to bury the whole pot. Otherwise, it will draw moisture from the soil to the air.

When setting out pot-bound or root-bound transplants, gently spread out the roots in all directions. That helps them become re-established more quickly.

Give each transplant a boost by adding a shovelful of compost or well-rotted manure mixed with some bonemeal and wood ashes to the bottom of each planting hole. Do this under tomatoes, brassicas, eggplant, cucumbers, squash, and melons.

When you try to water transplants with a watering can, does most of the water run off in another direction? Give each transplant its own drip-watering system. Poke a tiny hole in the bottom of a gallon-sized plastic jug. Fill with water and put next to the newly set tomato plant or in a hill of melons after the seedlings are up.

Why risk the possibility of having to replant? Protect young plants from being nipped by frost or nibbled by animals. Cut the bottom out of gallon-sized plastic milk jugs. Leave the cap off, for ventilation. Place over seedlings. This acts like a mini-greenhouse. You can also do this over seeds of tender crops. One gardener keeps a jug on her zucchini until the leaves push the jug off the ground.

Keep a drum of manure tea brewing for supplemental feeding of transplants or any green thing that needs a quick infusion. Fill a big garbage can about one-eighth full of fresh horse or cow manure, then fill the can with water. Stir occasionally and wait a week or two. This is powerful stuff. Dilute it until it’s the color of weak tea before using. Add water to the can after every use. When the water is the color of weak tea, start again, after adding the spent manure to your compost pile.

Make vegetarian tea the same way, using stinging nettles or comfrey leaves. The latter are rich in potash, so are good for all vegetables.

A lazy gardening friend brews manure tea from his children’s pet rabbit droppings in a five-gallon plastic drum with a cover.

Use a fifty-five gallon metal drum and attach a spigot and valve a few inches from the bottom of the drum. Drill a hole near the top and use an Shook to suspend a container of manure inside. Fill the barrel with water.

Gardeners who use this system tried a laundry bag for the manure at first, but the cloth disintegrated. Now they have cut four rectangular holes out of a plastic bucket and put aluminum screening inside. They fill the bucket with manure and suspend it in the water from the rim of the barrel.

They’ve set the barrel on a three-foot wooden stand located at the top of their garden. They keep a length of hose laid out specifically for manure tea delivery. They can either attach a nozzle to spray or remove it to dribble manure water on transplants or any crop that needs a quick boost.

Tip Top Tomatoes

To reduce moisture loss and encourage a strong root system, prune off all but the top rosette and the large leaves just below it. Bury the rest of the stem. If it is leggy, lay it in a trench. The tomato will put out roots all along the stem. One gardener digs a hole or trench deeper than needed, stuffs shredded newspaper in it to help hold moisture, then covers it with soil and places the transplants as usual.

Ray Lambert takes some time to install self-fertilizing tomatoes. First he digs out an eight-to twelve-inch deep circle four feet in diameter, fills it with manure and compost, and puts a little soil on top. He plants six early (determinate) tomato plants around the circumference of the circle and slips wire cages over them. In the center of the circle, he sets a two-foot high two-foot diameter cylinder of pea wire. He fills it with manure and compost.

In dry weather, he lets a hose trickle into the top of the feeding cylinder. He does virtually nothing else — doesn’t prune, doesn’t weed, doesn’t feed. The cages contain the plants, the plants are close enough together so they shade the soil and no weeds grow, and the center cylinder does the feeding.

He does the same thing with late varieties of tomatoes, but because they need more room, he sets only four plants around one feeding cylinder. In mid-August, he chops off the tops, so all growth goes to ripening tomatoes.

Plant borage among the tomatoes to attract bees for early fruit set.

If you’re a fisherman and sometimes get trash fish such as suckers, don’t throw them back. Pop them into your freezer. Come planting time, think of the Indians at the Plymouth Colony, and drop them into the soil. Try placing one in a hole dug for a tomato plant, for example. Put the fish in first, then three or four inches of soil, then the plant. As an experiment, put a fish under every other tomato plant, so that you can measure the results.

Pampering Peppers

If you’ll be watering your long-season crops such as tomatoes and peppers, mound up a circular dam around each plant. You’ll spend much less time watering, and you won’t be wasting the water that would spread out away from the plants.

Peppers prefer slightly acid soil. Bury a few book matches under each pepper plant when you set them in the garden. The sulfur in the match heads will increase soil acidity. Make sure to put a bit of soil between the matches and plant’s roots.

Peppers are finicky. They don’t like cold or heat, but prefer a temperature between 53° and 85°. Mulching plants helps maintain even temperature and moisture. Do plant in rich, well-drained soil and give lots of water.

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