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How to Transplant Your Starter Plants into Your Garden

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I thought I should show you how to transplant starter plants into your garden!  When it comes to garden ideas, it doesn’t get much easier than that!  Do you remember a couple of weeks ago when I showed you how to plant starter plants? Well…enough time has passed that they are ready to go in the garden here at our little urban homestead! It is really a pretty easy thing to do! I have included affiliate links to a couple of awesome products that we love for gardening.  Anyway…enough shop talk.  Are you ready to transplant your starter plants? Well, read on, my friend! (If you didn’t plant your own starter plants, you can also use these instructions for starter plants purchased at the store.)

transplant starter plants

These are the plants we planted a couple of weeks ago…

transplant starter plants

Transplant Starter Plants

First of all, here is a quick video if you are a visual learner (don’t mind the five-year-old photo-bombing):

So basically step-by-step:   you are going to want to select a good area for planting.  One that gets plenty of sun.  Once you have done that, you will need to prepare the soil.  Depending on how you are set up and how big of a garden you are planting, that can mean anything from breaking up the soil with a shovel to tilling.  We have several garden squares because we find it easier to get to the plants.  Most people just garden in rows.  Do whatever works for you.  Once you have loosened the soil, smooth it out a bit (but keep it loose, don’t pack it tightly).

At the end of the previous gardening season, my husband covered all of our garden beds with compost and chicken coop leftovers.  When we prepped our soil this spring it was dark and rich.  Easy to prep and perfect for planting!
Can I just say I really recommend the covering of the garden with the chicken coop leftovers (bedding and droppings)?  Our soil was AMAZING.  Made it soooo easy to plant.

transplant starter plants

We found this (not so) little guy while we were prepping our soil…

transplant starter plants

I should mention “hardening off”.  Hardening off is putting your starter plants outside for part of a day prior to transplanting them to allow them to get used to direct sunlight and outside temperature before you transplant them in your garden.

Ready to transplant now?   If you have planted your starter plants in plastic containers, you will want to break away the plastic and take the cluster of dirt that holds the plant.  If you did toilet paper rolls or paper towel rolls that were cut in half, you don’t necessarily have to break them away from the plant.  It is biodegradable.  That said we did remove this one so that you could see this beautiful root system 🙂

transplant starter plants

Now our soil was super soft, so we just stuck a little old leftover board in and rotated it around to make a nice hole for transplanting our starter plants.  (If you haven’t gotten started on planting your starter plants yet, you can learn how to do that here.)

transplant starter plants

If your soil is more firm when you are transplanting your starter plants, you could use a garden trowel like this affiliate link from Amazon:

Anyway, next you should place your little starter plant (these are peas) in the hole that you have prepared in your garden and surround it with loose dirt.  Pat it down a bit with your hand so that the plant is well-supported.

transplant starter plants

Voila! Your plant is transplanted!

Once you have transplanted your plants, be sure to give them a good watering.  You can do that with anything from a watering can to a garden hose, to a nice garden irrigation system.  We do ours a couple of ways.  One is the black hose seen on the left in this picture.  It has smaller hoses with tiny holes and one line goes between each row in the garden.  Doing it that way is called drip irrigation.  In case you are interested in something like that, here’s an affiliate link:

It is not the exact one that we have, but it’s quite similar.  If it isn’t the right size for your garden I would recommend that you just look around a little.  We love this sort of system because that way you just turn the garden hose valve on and off.  Everything else is done for you.  I am all about being lazy in some situations and this is one of them.  We LOVE it!

transplant starter plants

We also have another garden area that my husband built a nice little irrigation system for; we have really been happy with it.  I am planning to post about that next week…so be watching for it!

Here are our happy little plants in their new home…

transplant starter plants

Some plants like peas and green beans need a trellis to help support weight as the plants get taller and start to have yummy peas and green beans on them.  You can buy a garden trellis, but in the picture above, we just used a large dog kennel.  We were able to get it for free.  If it’s free, it’s for me!

Well, peeps…if you didn’t start out knowing how to transplant your starter plants, hopefully now you do!  If you have any gardening-type questions, feel free to leave them in the comments and I will do my best to answer them!  The journey to self-reliance is one best taken together.  If you have great gardening tips, I would love to hear them as well!

See ya next time!

Deb

plant starter plants

P.S.  Now that you have your garden planted, don’t spend all of your time watering it!  Check out how you can make a custom-made garden irrigation system!

garden irrigation system

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Rebecca

Thursday 3rd of May 2018

Great steps, but one very important one you might want to mention: hardening off!!! Lest all your hard work die the first 24 hours in the garden. ?

Debra

Friday 4th of May 2018

Thanks for mentioning that! I will add an edit and mention that.

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