Starting Seeds Indoors: Part Two - Transplanting Your Seedlings

With spring just around the corner with warmer weather and longer days, its time to start your garden in Zone 8b of coastal South Carolina! A couple of weeks ago, I shared my process for starting seeds indoors. With the seeds sprouting in their trays, it’s now time to transplant them to a larger pot and hardening them off before planting them outside in the garden. To prepare for the process, I partially pack small peet pots with a mix of garden soil and compost. I try to leave the same amount of space in the peet pot as what I estimate is size of my seedling and the soil pod that contains its root ball. I also have labels or I write it on the peet pot so that I can identify the plant later. All baby plants look the same to me. 

Once you have everything prepared, remove the tray from your grow box and use a butter knife to run around the edge of each section of the seed tray. This hopefully will help the entire little pod to come up and preserve as much of the root ball as possible. I also try to press a little from the bottom to remove the whole pod. If you ended up with multiple strong seedlings in your pod, you can try to split the pod and preserve the root ball of each but it’s tricky. If you end up damaging the plant or root ball too much, your plant will not survive the move. Then I place the seedling and root ball in the peet pot and loosely pack the cup with my soil and compost mixture. I leave around an inch of space from the lid so I can water them with less mess. Each time I move a plant to a peet pot, I’m adding a label to that plant or making sure I write it on the pot. The number of times I’ve not labeled a plant and needed to surprise myself later when I planted it in the garden is embarrassingly high. 

Now that I have each plant in its own peet pot, I move the plants to a sunny spot in my house: in front of a window, a table in your Carolina room, anywhere that gets natural sunlight. If that is not an option, you can use a grow light in this step as well. I recommend you move the plants out of the grow box though. Hardening plants is an important step that toughens them up. Once the plants have been growing in their peet pots a week, I’ll even move them outside for a few hours each day to allow them a chance to acclimate to outdoors little by little. Warning: don’t forget about your plants just in case with a cold snap in February or March. Also- March can have very windy days. You don’t want your plants to get damaged if they blow off your table while they are on their first field trip outside. 

Next article we are finally going to put our young vegetable plants in the ground! If you’d like a vegetable plant or(or more) delivered to you this season, please let me know. If I have extras, I’ll gladly give them to you. To learn more about living along the Grand Strand, please don’t hesitate to contact us. We’d love to learn more about you and your real estate goals so that we can help you make the best decision possible for you and your family. 

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