Q+A: Buying Vegetable Plants

WHAT TO BUY / NOT BUY

• Do buy crops that are normally started indoors to transplant (e.g. tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, cabbage family, basil.)
• It’s your call with many direct-sown crops (those that are seeded straight into the garden such as carrots, beets, cucumber, and Swiss chard.) You may find buying transplants saves time...or helps when you have no idea what the crops look like.
• Think twice about buying direct-sown crops that are very easy to grow: lettuce, spinach, radish, peas, beans, and dill come to mind. These are all very easy to grow from seed...and grow quickly enough that you can reseed if your first attempt fails.

HOW TO CHOOSE

• You want “stocky” plants—not gangly, wispy plants the dance to and fro when you pick up the pot. If the plant can barely stand up in the pot, imagine how it will fare in your garden.
• You want bug-free plants. Look under the leaves before you buy...that’s were bugs often hide.
• You don’t want plants that are so far advanced that they have become very “root bound” in the pot or cell pack. Sometimes they never recover. I’ll often slip a plant out of a cell pack to look at the roots. Look for roots that have coiled around and around so much that you can’t even see the soil mix.
• Most veggies have green leaves. If transplants look very, very yellow, something is not right.

WHERE TO BUY

• For heirloom veggies, check out Urban Harvest (www.uharvest.ca)
• Fiesta Farms (www.fiestafarms.ca) usually has a great selection of good quality transplants. Owner Joe Virgona told me in the past how he’ll ask growers who supply transplants whether they’ve opened up the sides of their poly greenhouses to “harden off” seedlings. This is more than a lot of chain stores.
• With chain stores, it’s buyer beware. Sometimes you’ll find great looking stuff, other times, rubbish. Use my how-to-choose pointers above.

Steven Biggs
Gardener, Garden Writer, Garden Coach, Horticulturist

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