If you do vegetable gardening, chances are you buy some plants from nurseries or other growers.  Broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants are the most commonly bought starts.  Just because someone else started them, doesn’t mean you can stick them anywhere and get a good crop.

Transplants Need Care

Transplants should be planted with the same care as seeds.  That means that you prepare the garden plot, make sure there is water, add necessary fertilizer, and keep caring for the plant as if it had grown from seed.

Need Sunshine

For example, vegetables need a minimum of six hours of sun.  They can certainly be planted in flower beds along the house.  However, make sure that those beds get the six hours of sun needed or the plant will die.  The front of my house almost never gets sun, so very little grows there.  The back does get sun, but I never go there and any plants put there would be neglected.

Planting the Transplant

That said, dig a hole a bit bigger than the plant you want to put in it.  Hold the plant in the hole, with the crown level with the ground.  The crown is where the top meets the bottom.  There is usually a noticeable knot and the soil should reach just to that knot.  Fill in the hole with the dirt that came out of it. 

If you put super soil mix in the hole instead of the dirt that came out of it, one of two things will happen.  First, the roots will not spread out but will circle to stay in the rich dirt.  This will eventually girdle the plant.  It isn’t such a problem with vegetable plants that live a short time but is a problem with trees, shrubs, and perennials.

Too Much Fertilizer, No Vegetables

The other problem super soil in the dirt around the plant causes is that the plant grows like crazy and has no vegetables.  All those rich nutrients cause the plant to spend all its energy on growing and leave none for reproduction.  Since vegetables are really seed carriers, if there is no reproduction, there is no vegetable.

Water In the Transplant

After you plant your transplant, water it well so the surrounding soil does not suck all the moisture out of it.  From there, you treat it like a sprouted seed and grow it normally.  Hopefully, it will give you a good start to a good crop.

Want to learn to garden? My first attempt at gardening ended up in failure. The weeds took over and squeezed the vegetables out. I was very frustrated by this waste of good seed, time, and money. So I became a master gardener and spent a lot of time helping other people avoid or overcome problems in their garden. 

In order to help others garden successfully, I have written a book, Vegetable Gardening from the Ground Up, available in an ebook or a paperback from Amazon. It is also in Kindle Unlimited.