(mellow country music)
- One of the most frequent questions I get is
why do I transplant so many of my plants
over direct sowing them?
So today I actually wanted to go over
the pros and cons of transplanting
versus direct seeding, and also which plants
I will choose to direct sow over transplanting.
So before we get into all the pros and cons
of the different methods, first of all, you could see,
I have quite a lot of plants here.
And a lot of these are going to go into the ground
within the next week.
But I want to show you guys
what a healthy seedling looks like just for reference.
So this is a broccoli plant.
You can see it's got, I don't know, six leaves or so.
And they're all quite large.
The plant is very upright.
It's not drooped over.
It also has very little damage.
There's no yellowing of the leaves.
So the nutrition is still good.
And you could see that there's actually roots
coming out the bottom.
So what that means is that
I managed the water on this one well,
and more importantly, what that means is
I let this dry out in between waterings,
which forces the roots to go down to seek water.
So that's why you have these roots coming out the bottom.
And they're white, they look very healthy.
This guy, I can already tell when I pick up this one,
it's the same pot size as the other one,
but it's a lot heavier.
And this is one of these plants
that I had left out in the rain.
So it sat, very soggy, very wet,
a lot wetter than it should have been.
And you can see that some of these leaves
are starting to become yellow, become spotty.
They don't look very healthy.
The plant isn't very tall.
It has the same amount of leaves, give or take.
But I should note, this is also a cabbage
rather than a broccoli, so it is going to grow differently.
But just in general, the bigger of this
just doesn't look as good.
It's pretty upright and there's no roots
coming out the bottom.
So really what happened here is
you could see this is still quite moist.
This just got too wet for too long.
And that kind of stunted the plant.
I should say that you don't have to go up
in such a big pot size.
This is a broccoli that was potted
in something about half the volume of soil there.
This one looks pretty good.
The leaves are nice and green.
There's a little bit of nibbling, but nothing scary.
So yeah, there's a lot of different options.
But that's a healthy versus kind of a less healthy plant.
All right, now that we've seen examples
of what a healthy transplant and maybe
what a more stunted transplant looks like,
let's take a look at some healthy seedlings.
So right here is an example of broccolini.
What you'll see first of all
is that I put two to three seeds per cell
and they all are coming out green.
So they still have maybe another week
that I could leave them in here.
But once you see that first and even second leaf emerging,
it's actually a good time for you
to either pot them up or just transplant them
directly in the ground.
I'm growing all of my transplant starts
in the Epic six cells.
These are absolutely my favorite seed starting tray
that I've ever used.
And I'll show you an example of it right here
why I like it so much.
What you'll see on all these corners here
is that they're cut out.
And these white bits here
are actually roots from this plant.
So that's a great sign, because they're white,
which means that I mentioned that earlier,
when you see a white root,
that means that it's had plenty of oxygen.
And when they start to turn brown and maybe black,
like this one's actually starting to die off a little bit.
What that means is that it's sat in stagnant water
and it hasn't had enough oxygen.
But these look great.
And the reason why this has cut out
is that once the root comes down
and sends out little feeder roots,
they'll hit the wall and they'll start looking
for somewhere else to go, which is that way or this way.
And since these are cut out,
they hit this and they get exposed to air,
which prunes the roots.
So what you get is a nice, healthy seedling
with roots at all the different corners
that are immediately, once they're in the ground,
going to be spreading outwards
and seeking water and nutrients.
So that makes for a very healthy plant start.
And it's one of the reasons
I really like using these so much,
beyond the ability to just poke these out.
(mellow country music)
Here's an example of a long overdue seedling
that I really should have transplanted or potted up
a long time ago.
What you'll see is that a lot of the leaves
are starting to turn yellow.
They're starting to die.
There's just not enough nutrients
for how big these plants are now.
And what you'll also see is that
they really are starting to look for more space
by pushing away from each other.
So you have all these long gangly stems
and tangled root masses.
So this is the point where the plant
will probably still be fine.
I'll probably end up taking the cells that have two plants
and splitting them into their own space.
But they'll be fine, but really I should have
dealt with these maybe two weeks ago.
One of the main reasons I switched to transplanting
over direct sowing is pest damage.
And I have two examples here of celery.
And in this case, these were actually transplanted,
but they were transplanted too young.
So maybe two or three leaves,
and for celery it takes quite a while to get to that point.
But basically what's happened is that
you could probably see it from here,
but I'll bring in a little closer,
that all these leads have been chewed up.
They've suffered a lot of damage.
It's actually recovering now.
At one point, and there was almost nothing left
because they were covered in rolly pollies,
which you could only really see that happen
if you come out at night to check on your plants.
But needless to say,
like that broccoli I showed you earlier,
that's an example of a seedling that
with those six, seven leaves,
even if two or three or even four
get entirely chewed up by something like an earwig,
it still has another three leaves to continue its growth
and go on to be a happy plant.
So that's reason number one
I like to transplant over direct sow.
My personal favorite choice
for why I prefer transplanting over direct sowing
is the flexibility and planning it gives you.
So over here, you could see,
I have a bed that has a variety of different things growing.
Like this pepper, for instance,
still has some peppers ripening.
So rather than having to pull this plant out
and then direct seeding my broccoli plant,
I could just take the broccoli plant
that I started on the 5th of September, so over a month ago,
that's fully ready to go and grow.
And for instance, right here, I had a pepper.
I just pulled it out yesterday.
Now, all I have to do is dig a hole
and transplant this broccoli right into the ground.
And the reason why that's so important
is because if I were to pull that pepper yesterday
and then direct sow a broccoli seed in this bed right here,
it would be one to two months
before it even got to this size.
Because we're getting into winter
when the sun is starting to decrease.
So I need every bit of sunlight,
every bit of time advantage that I could get.
So this just bought me well over a month in free time
where I had that pepper producing
while the broccoli was getting ready to go into the ground.
So that's why you kind of see sometimes I have beds
where there's a variety of things going,
and that's mostly because I start transplants
with no real idea of where they're going to end up going.
But whenever I have a spot,
I can just grab one of those healthy plants
and just pop it into the ground.
So tip number two, time-savings and flexibility
in your planting.
(soft country music)
This next reason is a big deal for people
who are in more arid climates like my own
here in San Diego.
A lot of times, people in climates like mine
will be using drip irrigation,
which is fantastic for conserving water.
But what happens when you use drip
is actually pretty well demonstrated right here.
So you'll see right where the drip emitter is,
it's quite wet.
And so you can see it right here, for example,
in between those two lines,
it's actually fairly dry right here.
So if I were to try to direct seed,
that limits me to putting seeds only
wherever I have one of these drip emitters.
Otherwise I'm going to have a really hard time
getting this to germinate over here in this dry area.
And I'm going to have to supplement it
with things like watering it by hand with a hose
or putting up a sprinkler.
For people where you get more seasonal rains,
and you could actually have enough water
to just use sprinklers,
this won't really be a problem for you.
But for those of us in arid climates,
it actually saves a lot of water.
And I'll show you another example of that right now.
Starting seeds as transplants instead of direct sowing
can actually save you quite a lot of water
because I could keep all of my seedlings in the shade
where they're not going to dry out.
I could put them indoors where I could protect them
from wind and other things like that.
Rather than having to go back and forth
and wet the entire bed to keep that consistent moisture,
all I have to do is keep consistent moisture
and a tiny volume of soil.
So tip number three, save a lot of water.
There is another reason to favor transplants
over direct sowing.
And it's more context specific to your beds are built.
This example, this is a low tillage bed
and the top layer is compost.
So what you'll find with compost is that
it has a lot of woody material, like big chunks,
and this can be really challenging to direct seed into.
It's not impossible, but some crops are just going to
be a lot harder than others.
Things that have smaller seeds, for example,
going be a lot trickier to do in a straight compost bed.
The nice thing about the transplants in this example
is that it doesn't matter what the surface is,
even if it's absolutely covered in mulch.
For instance, like if I had this entire bed
covered in straw, it'd be very difficult
to plant through the straw with a direct sowing method.
But with a transplant, all you have to do is
push everything apart and then pop your transplant in,
and you're good to go.
Now that I've shown you guys some of my major reasons
for transplanting over direct sowing,
I wanted to show and talk about some of the plants
that I always direct sow.
Right here, I have cilantro.
It's a little miniature field of cilantro
that I've planted here.
And the reason why I planted this directly
instead of transplanting is that
cilantro is one of those crops that has a taproot.
And if you disturb the taproot when you're transplanting it,
chances are you could actually kill the plant.
So if you've had trouble with cilantro in the past,
it's a good chance that it was a transplant
rather than one that you've direct sown.
As an example, I've actually sown some cilantro here,
in a six cell, and you could see that
they're not very large,
but there's already a lot of purpling,
a lot of the leaves don't look very healthy.
If I did transplant this,
there's a chance that they will survive,
but they're going to be stunted for so long
that it's probably not worth it.
One vegetable that I'll never transplant,
and I often actually see at nurseries,
oddly enough, are carrots.
Carrots are basically entirely taproot.
So transplanting them, you're going to have a bad time.
Also, what are you going to do with a transplanted carrot?
You need so many of them that it would be
almost kind of silly to transplant each individual carrot.
So you could see here, I have quite a few growing,
and I'll let them grow really close to each other,
then come back in and thin them by just harvesting.
So yeah, there you go.
One really nice carrot.
Something that I direct sow all the time.
So back here I have the remaining stalks of my corn
from earlier this season.
Corn is something I tend to find does much better
when it's direct sown over transplanted.
When it's transplanted, I find that it falls over more
and it's more prone to kind of being eroded from the soil.
So that's something that I'm always going to
try to direct sow in the future.
Another thing that tends to do really well
being direct sown rather than transplanted
are things like squash,
whereas zucchini, anything like that,
anything that has a large seed,
can pretty much be very vigorous from the beginning,
rather than something like, imagine a lettuce.
It's first leaves are very tiny.
It's more susceptible to pest pressure.
So anything that has big leaves right at the start
tend to do really well direct sown.
But you could still opt to just transplant them anyway.
But things that have taproots, things like corn,
sunflower, carrots, cilantro,
I'm to opt to direct sow as often as I can.
Hopefully this video answered a lot of your questions
as to why I prefer transplanting over direct sowing.
And hopefully a lot of those reasons made sense to you guys.
If you had any other reasons
why you like to transplant over direct sowing,
or any questions about what I just went over,
please drop them in the comments.
Otherwise, if you enjoyed the video,
I'd really appreciate a like,
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because I have a lot more videos coming
and I'd like to get into a lot more details
than what I just covered today.
So thank you for watching, and Garden Hermits out.