[CHAPTER XVII.]
TRANSPLANTING.
If the pits for the plants have been all prepared, as directed at pages [59] and [75], this operation is simple enough.
A fortnight or so before it commences tip all the seedlings in the nursery. Take off only the closed leaf at the head of each young plant (see a leaf diagram, page [104]), so that the bud at the base of the next leaf be not injured. Doing this will make the seedlings hardier and enable them earlier to recover the transplanting.
On the day you intend to take up the seedlings from any bed, if you have water enough at command, flood the bed. This, as you take up each seedling, will cause the soil, being moist, to adhere better to the roots.
The difference between young plants transplanted with a ball of earth round the roots, and those moved with their roots bare, is no less than three months’ growth, if even it does not make the difference between life and death.
Proceed thus to ensure the former. At one short end of the bed, the lowest if it is on a slope, dig close to the first row of seedlings a trench so deep that its base shall be lower than the lowest end of the tap-roots. Then with a five or six-pronged steel fork (this is better than a spade, for it does not cut the rootlets) put in between the first and second row, and pressed down with the foot to its head, force carefully so much of the row down into the trench. Then with the hand take up each seedling separately, helping the soil with a very light pressure (so light that it shall not change the lateral direction of any of the rootlets) to adhere, and place it in a low basket sloping. Do this again and again, till two baskets are full, when they will be carried, banghy fashion, to the garden.
When the first row is finished clear away the loose soil, so that a similar trench to the first shall be formed, and then proceed as above with the second row, and so on.
No further directions for lifting the seedlings out of the nurseries are required.
All is ready for their reception in the garden if the directions at pages [59] and [75] have been followed out. The work now to be detailed must be done by careful men well superintended.