Week 3 - Planting Seeds & Transplants

For episode/article 3 for This Week in the Garden, we’ll cover planting seeds and transplants in the garden. During this step, we finally begin to feel like gardening and we get to enjoy a little victory after all of the hard work from planning and preparing.

Deciding the right time to plant can be a crucial step in determining the success of your garden. I recommend using the Eastern N.C. Planting Calendar from N.C. State University to give you a general timeline. Then, try to find a 4-5 day period within that timeline where you’ll have: days with highs in the 60’s-70’s, lows no lower than 50, no storms with more than 0.5 inches of rain, and winds lower than about 15 mph. These are really ideal conditions for a summer garden and may be hard to come by. The warm temperature will help with the germination of seeds, and warm low temperatures will help the newly emerged seedling survive. You don’t want excessive rainfall that may wash away seeds (more on water later). Finally, you don’t want strong winds that may damage new transplants.

When it comes to planting, there are really only two options - seeds and transplants. The only things that can’t be grown as seeds are peppers and tomatoes. When choosing seeds, make sure they haven’t expired, as that will lower how many seeds germinate. At planting, bury the seeds the length of the seed. Uniform planting depth will help your seeds emerge at the same time and again will give you better emergence and germination.

When planting transplants, allow the young plants to acclimate to the outdoor weather, by gradually exposing them to more sunlight over the course of a week. If they were placed outdoors at the store, you should be fine to plant them right away. Dig a hole slightly wider and deeper than the transplant’s roots and gently massage the roots to help them spread. Bury the roots to the crown (where the roots meet the stem), which will be around the transplant’s original soil line.

Watering is the last step in planting. Make sure the soil stays moist for the first two weeks after planting. The amount you will need to water will vary depending on the soil type, temperature, and rainfall. The goal should be about an inch of water a week, but that may need to be altered. For example, in the sandy section of my garden, I’ve got to water for about ten minutes twice a day to keep the soil moist, which ends up being closer to 1.5 inches. In the section with heavy clay, I water once every three days to make sure the seeds don’t rot with excess moisture, about 0.5 inches.

That’s all for this episode/article of This Week in the Garden. Don’t forget to enter our first giveaway. You have until 5 pm on May 15th to enter, all you need to do is subscribe to our series through Eventbrite, take a picture of your garden, and email it to me, it’s that simple! The picture can be of any size, shape, or type of vegetable garden as long as it’s yours from this year. Include in the email a list of seed preferences you have and we’ll do our best to include something from your list! Check out our new website where we’ll store all of our articles/videos in case you missed any. If you have any questions about any of our articles make sure to fill out our form.

-Adam