It begins in earnest...

So I got the pots on Monday, and have now decided to do the mass transplanting required. The spring onions are mostly currently a big tuft of green centered in one of the buckets which is really worrying me, they'll definitely need to be transplanted soon or their roots will become tangled and break when I try and transplant them later. What looks like fifty spring onions share a 4cm by 8cm spot in one of the bucket. I suck at this whole planting thing.

On a different note though, the lettuce has sprouted(I have yet to see anything from the onions though). The garlic sprouted over the weekend, and everything's growing merrily. The spinach must be transplanted now or it's gonna be stunted and useless for the rest of it's life.

I purchased 80L of potting mix($14) on Tuesday. Bringing the total up to $150 for the garden, yikes.

So I transplanted 80 spinaches into 80 of the 249 10cm pots, including 39 from the 40 cell germination tray(one runty one died. *cry*). I was one short but as they were ~10-11c each I didn't complain really, much better than the $1.30 I was paying for the 15cm pots. Trademe is definitely the way to go. I perfected a production line technique which went something like:

1. Full up about 20-30 pots with potting soil
2. Soak with water to drop the level a cm or two, also it wets the soil all the way through and makes it easier to get the seedlings in
3. Move four over to the bucket
4. Slowly dig out the seedlings by digging underneath them then breaking the soil apart gently until I just had the plant in my hand. I only held them by the leaf, I think that's what you're supposed to do.
   
5. I use my other forefinger to stab a hole in the pot plant
6. Put the seedling in and gently! close the wet mix around it's roots. It should be snug around the leaves.
7. Move that four over to the designated spinach area.
8. Repeat steps 3-7 until you have used up the lot, then repeat steps 1-8.

Simple easy guide. Using this you can do about 20 in 5 minutes. It's handy as heck. I now have a proud field of 95 spinach plants and seven garlic plants.

The garlic was pretty amazing. While it had like a 2cm little nubbin coming out of the ground, it had a huuuuge network of roots underneath which had a very typical garlic smell. I felt criminal transplanting it into the 10cm pot, but it had to be done. The root bundle reached about 10cm down and 10 cm across.

I am intending to set up a vermiposting bin to create super high nutritious fertilizer, the idea being that if I can get enough nutrients and water to the plants they won't need as much space. Kinda like hydroponics.