Hi, I’m Ed Bruske. We’re talking about how you can start your own vegetable garden and grow food right outside your house. And right now, we’re going to look at how your going to transplant those seedlings that you’ve started inside into your garden outside. And to do that as an example, I’ve got this tomato plant here, kind of a lanky tomato plant. I bought it at the grocery store this morning because mine aren’t quite ready to do this. But it is an organic tomato plant and if you’re growing organically when you buy plants, make sure you ask and make sure that the plants you’re buying are organic. Now some people would take a tomato plant like this and actually dig a trench and plant it on its side with just the leaves showing. Now the reason for that is that tomato interestingly enough will grow roots all along its stem here.

So if you were to let a tomato grow wild, it will grow long to the ground and it would send out roots all over its stem. And to get a nice root structure, you want to bury your tomato plant right up to the top most leaves so that it develops those roots. But instead of digging a trench, I’m going to dig a hole here big enough to plant this tomato. I’m just going to take a little measurement to see about how deep that hole needs to be and mark it with this little stake here.

Now I figured, if I’m going to be digging it all, I might as well dig a nice deep hole and get some compost down in there and improve the soil while I’m planting the tomato. I’ll just take a quick measurement. It came up to about this notch right there and we’re almost there already.

So I’m going to put some compost in the hole and work it in. Now I’m going to remove the tomato plant from its plastic container. And to do that, I just jiggle it upside down, support the stem with my other hand, lay my tomato in there and then just start pressing the soil around it in place, not too hard. I like to get that like a good soil, not so much clay, pressing it down a little as I go so there aren’t any big air pockets.

Now what I would do is water that tomato plant in. It might even need a little bit of more support that works. If it needs a little support for the time being, we can stake it like that and then we’ll build a cage around it to support it later on.

I’m going to show you something a little bit more easier than the tomato and that’s planting a small jalapeno pepper that I planted inside a several weeks ago. It’s just a small little plant. I’ve already made a hole for it and amended it with some compost and this is more like the procedure you would use for most transplanting. I have a cell-pack here with four jalapenos in it and jalapenos are in the same sort of family as the tomato plants so they are something that you can safely plant in the same bed here. And one of the things we want to do is each year rotate our plants in the same family into different beds so that they don’t develop disease organisms in the soil that may attack the plants, so that system of rotation is part of the organic scheme to avoid diseases.

Anyway, to get the jalapeno out, I’m just going to spoon it out off the cell-pack and place it in the hole to the correct depth just so the crown is about even with the soil level, maybe a little bit lower than the soil level. And then, were going to press it firmly but not too hard just to press the air out of that. And then we would take our watering can and carefully water that plant in. And the next thing were going to talk about is how to use mulch in your vegetable garden.