Steps to victory…

[Johnny PhantomMember]

Hello Charles,

We’ve read a few books – yours and others – (and countless website tips) about how to grow healthy seedlings (plants) as we’ve been struggling every year with growing FAT healthy seedlings with thick strong leaves and fat stems since we’ve started vegetable gardening a few years ago. Your books taught us a lot including correct watering, light and temperature affecting seedlings’ growth and we’ve been experimenting with different things to assist our seedlings in the growing environment available to us.
However, we’re still looking for precise descriptions of how to handle seedlings at each stage of seedlings’ growth as we’re vague on exactly when and how we should be moving them into a new module or a new pot.
For example, you talk about how to deal with tomato seedlings step by step in your ‘Organic Gardening’ book – which is great information for us as beginners and we are so confident with trying that way because we know we’re doing correct things.
At the moment, we sow 4 to 10 seeds in each 3 cm module depending on which vegetable seeds. When they start having tiny green seed leaves after their germination – of course, at this stage they haven’t developed decent roots yet, we select healthy looking ones, prick them out and move individual tiny seedlings into each 3 cm module, which means each tiny seedling is provided with a big enough space to grow.
This is how we’re doing things at the moment, but we have some doubt whether this is the correct time to move them or not.
The past experience and evidence so far tell us that they started growing very slowly and even struggled to develop the true leaves after we moved them at this stage and some seedlings started being unhealthy and often died although we were aware of correct watering, enough intensive light, warmth and providing enough good feelings towards them!
This is just a beginners’ guess but we must have been missing something very basic and very important – like using a wrong or bad compost or dull batch as you pointed out in the answers to some of our other questions.
Any advice is always greatfully appreciated.
Thank you very much always,

JP’s wife

[charlesModerator]

 You guys are certainly thorough, strange that something is not working, although I think you are focussing here on the bad bits more than the good bits.

Seedlings are best moved just before the first true leaf appears i.e. they have healthy cotyledons, which are the first two thin leaves – or round ones in the case of brassicas, which are robust and the easiest to prick out (cabbage, calabrese, cauliflower etc). I make a hole with a pencil, use the pencil to lift seedlings with 50-100% of their roots, then stuff the roots into the pencil hole, often folded around and with the stem pushed in too so that the seedling is not leggy. It looks rough to an onlooker but as long as you do not break/fracture the soft stem (hold seedlings by leaf), seedlings should sit there for a few days before growing strongly. They do take time to recover, but strangely often grow into plants at least as strong as when directly sown, if not more so.

Water seedlings in after pricking out, then none for two or three days unless it is hot sun. Mine have full daylight in a greenhouse, in a conservatory they should grow fine but will be long stemmed (leggy) from relative lack of light. I have never used artificial light, imagine this helps.

3cm module should be fine for what you describe. Certainly no bigger unless it is peas and beans.

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