Young Plants or Starter Seeds for Your Spring Vegetable Garden
When it comes to getting started with your garden, you can start by planting seeds or buy newly sprouted and growing plants. Both have their own benefits.
If you plant seeds and care for them every day, you will find it is a much more rewarding experience when you have a full, healthy plant. However, not all seeds are the same. Get a good brand of seeds.
If you choose to buy the plant from a nursery and install it in your garden, it reduces a lot of the work involved in making it healthy.
However, I have found in the past that some nurseries will inadvertently harm the plant by putting certain chemicals or fertilizers in the soil.
How to Choose Your Plants
Here I will discuss some of the techniques I use in my screening process for plants.
One thing you need to check for on your prospective plants is how nice they look.
As far as plants go, you can truly judge a book by its cover. If a plant has been treated healthily and has no diseases or pests, you can almost always tell by how nice it looks.
If a plant has grown up in improper soil or has harmful bugs living in it, you can tell from the holey leaves and wilted stems.
If you’re browsing the nursery shelves looking for your dream plant, you want to exclude anything that currently has flowers.
Butternut Squash Summer Flowers
Plants are less traumatized by the transplant if they do not currently have any flowers. It’s best to find ones that just consist of buds. However, if all you have to choose from are flowering plants, remove the buds a few days before planting.
It will be worth it for the future health of the plant. I’ve found that transplanting a plant while it is blooming results in having an unhealthy plant with stunted growth.
Look at the Roots
Always check the roots before you buy the plant. Of course, if the roots are in absolutely terrible condition you will be able to tell by looking at the rest of the plant.
But if the roots are just slightly out of shape, then you probably won’t be able to tell just by looking at it. Inspect the roots very closely for any signs of brownness, rottenness, or softness.
The roots should always be a firm, perfectly well-formed, infrastructure that holds all the soil together. One can easily tell if the roots are before or past their prime, depending on the root to soil ratio.
If there are a ridiculous amount of roots with little soil or a bunch of soil with few roots, you should not buy that plant.
If you find any abnormalities with the plant, whether it be the shape of the roots or any irregular features with the leaves, you might ask the nursery employees.
Although these things can be the sign of an unhealthy plant, occasionally there will be a logical explanation for it. Always give the nursery the opportunity to help out. After all, they are professionals who have been dealing with plants for years.
So if you decide to take the simpler route and get a plant from a nursery, you just have to remember you can check the health of the plants.
Also take every precaution you can to avoid transplant shock in the plant (when it has trouble adjusting to its new location and therefore has health problems in the future). Usually, the process goes smoothly, but you can never be too sure.
