Tying into yesterday’s post. We’ve been asked this many times in the past. Something along the lines of, “If you’re going to pot up your peppers and tomatoes, why not just do it once into the larger sized pot?”
It’s a fair question and certainly a single up-pot would be a whole lot less work! We’d certainly do it if we could! Well, the image shows you why!
Once we do this, just 72 plants will take up an entire 2×6 table and even then some! Once you start using these larger pot sizes, you get a whole lot less plant density than what we’re getting out of smaller pots and inserts. In fact, the only reason we can do this up-potting is because we’ve kicked out the majority of our plants to the greenhouse and now we can allocate more of our indoor gardens to continue growth on our pepper plants.
Put simply, we need to conserve the indoor growing space early on in the process, since we’re raising quite literally over a thousand plants! Sure, if we had all the space in the world, it’d be less of a big deal. But, not when you’re cramped for space, as is!
Again, the primary reason we end up doing this is because late frosts and stubborn springs can seriously delay when we can plant our peppers. We’ve waffled back and forth on this practice many times and almost always regret it when we don’t do it! This up-potting just gives us flexibility we don’t have otherwise.
At this point in the game, we have very few seedlings left that we need to process. If I roughly estimated it, we’re probably down to less than 150 plants that still need to up-potted, hardened off and tossed into the greenhouse. We’re hoping to be done with this quite soon, hopefully in the next week or so.
This is one of the reasons we like using imagery to tell our stories. The mind will definitely tend to simplify things and come up with easier ways to process a given task. But, when you see it, you’re like, “Oh, yeah. That’s not gonna work!”
