How to Transplant Seedlings: My High-Density Method

What is up everyone? Kevin from Epic Gardening here. Today we are going to be talking about transplanting greens in a high density way and my method that works pretty darn well to get them off to really good vigorous growth. So this is my EcoGarden Systems bed. It's the 1500 pound raised bed that gets about half shade throughout the day. So I dedicate it towards exclusively greens. What you can see me doing now is I'm pulling out my little transplants. And this is a mixture of, you know, bok choy, some very delicate heirloom lettuce varieties, some endive, et cetera. And I'm just using a knife to gently wedge it out. What I like to do is I definitely make sure that soil is nice and moist so that it doesn't crumble away and leave me with bare roots. You can see the roots are nice and healthy. Now I just grab a little spade and make about the depth of the actual transplant. So let's say it's two or three inches. I dig maybe just slightly deeper than that two or three inches. And now this is my killer product. This is the thing that I've been using lately. It's from Extreme Gardening, which you gotta be honest, I love the name there. But it's a mycorrhizal inoculant. So what I do is I put about a teaspoon, maybe two teaspoons into the hole, directly into the hole. And you really want it to be in contact with the root system immediately upon transplant. And you can see me looking at the roots here. Pretty pleased with these roots. They're nice, healthy looking roots. They're not too root bound and they're going to do really well without having to break them up at all. So I plop them in and I don't mix it around too much. I want that microbial or excuse me, that mycorrhizal inoculant to be there right at the roots. Because as we know, a mycorrhizal inoculant's job is to create and inoculate with mycorrhizal fungi. And what those do is they effectively extend the power of a root system by a considerable amount. And so check this out. What you're seeing me do here is go very dense on my planting. So instead of doing four per square foot, I'm actually doing about five per square foot here because I know I'm going to come through and hit this with a cut and come again method. I have another video on my channel that is all about cut and come again method, which is a very classic, very simple technique that I'm sure many of you are already familiar with. So I'm throwing spinach in here. This is a regiment spinach variety that is extremely, extremely delicious. And spinach in my area typically can have a hard time growing, but because we're in this 50% shade, it's going to do quite well. And what I'll do here because it's so closely spaced is I will come through and be extra sure to cut and come again on my spinach and just make sure that I'm not getting way too overcrowded here because I really am cramming these in quite a bit. So here I am just putting in the last two. And honestly, I like to mix up my plantings. I don't want to put four or even five per square foot of the exact same plant, especially in this particular bed because it's a very minor issue I would say, but I want to increase the sort of interplanting or intercropping just in case there's a particular pest that loves a particular plant. I know for me, I struggle quite a bit with my brassicas, things like kale, et cetera, because I have the cabbage loopers and the cabbage moths coming in and just decimating it. And so if I mix it up a little bit, it's not quite as obvious to those bugs at least, that there's all of their favorite food in one spot. So this is effectively my method guys. I really hope you enjoyed it. All I do now is I just water in and thin it out and we're good to go. So thanks so much for watching and I will see you on the next video. Definitely let me know what you thought in the comments down below.