One of the areas we occasionally like to cover are the actual mechanics of how to do things. Some things aren’t entirely straight forward, such as removing a plug from a seeding tray.
If you simply grab the seedling and try to pull it out, there’s a very good chance you’ll cause damage. At best, you’ll tear and destroy many roots. At worst, you’ll snap the seedling in half.
We utilize a small eye glass style flathead screwdriver to remove the plug. This allows you to go deep down the side of the plug, where you can then gently leverage the seedling out from the base of the plant.
When you have a plug, you want to insert it into a finger sized hole in the next size container. Followed by a gentle packing of the seedling to ensure it’s entirely surrounded by soil.
When you get the rhythm down, you can even use the screwdriver to create this hole, meaning your hands never have to drop the tool you’re using. This helps speed the process up.
The general goal is to minimize the damage to the seedling. The more you can reduce root disturbance, the less transplant shock you’ll experience. If you mess up and don’t get a good plug, just stuff it in the new soil as best you can. It’s OK, seedlings are surprisingly resilient. Oh, and make sure you water your transplanted seedlings as soon as possible!
One of the things we did is to establish a “sowing and transplanting” kit. It’s a gallon Ziplock bag that contains plant labels, a permanent marker, a seeder for bulk sowing and this eyeglass screwdriver inside a gallon Ziplock bag. This ensures we have practically everything we need to conduct sowing or transplants, at the ready!
