Thining Seedlings (Sugar Baby Watermelon 2014)

by Robert Leavitt

Greetings faithful readers.  I hope everyone has had a a great week and is looking forward to a weekend of gardening fun.  This week we are going to talk about thinning seedlings.

When seeds are sown, more often than not, more than one seed will make it down the hole.  Even using one of those little "seed cards" or the "seed wheel" doesn't always catch all of them and there are times when you may actually want to plant more than one seed in each hole.  Some seeds germinate better than others based on your current climate and soil conditions.

I did things a little bit backwards this year, and since I didn't have many pots in the beginning of my venture I went ahead and just sowed all my Sugar Baby watermelon seed straight into the hills.  I got carried away at times and there were some hills had 5 holes originally, and as many as 3 seeds per hole.  Of course the seed germinated beautifully so now I had these extra plants growing on each hill.

The original plan was to thin back to 4 plants per hill, so I choose my strongest plants that have grown the fastest to be the best canidates to produce the biggest, sweetest melon!  This always leaves the question: "What should I do with all those other plants?"

Sugar Baby Seedlings Crowding One Hill

The best thing to do is to take your garden snips and simply cut the plants that you don't want at their bases.  This will leave you with one plant per hole.  This will also not disturb the root structure of the one you leave behind and will allow it to continue to develop quickly.  The plants you just removed are small and the roots they have left behind wont matter as the main plant grows and takes over the area.  This is the prefered method.

I wanted to thin the hills down myself and save some plants for resale.  So I had to disturb everything.  I did take some pictures though to guide you along in your transplanting adventures. The first thing I did was grab some starter tray cells.  These will be the pots I am going to put my seedlings into.  I also used some of my "seed starter mix with fertilizer" for some soil.  Mostly I tried to keep them as much as possible in the original soil they were in.

I cut a hole with my garden spade all the way around the plant.  It's important to cut all around so you can lift out the plant, roots and all without disturbing them so much.

You can see that I got the whole section of plants, roots and all, and now I am going to start gently squeezing it to get some of the dirt to fall away.  You don't want to pull hard here, you want to make this as gentle as possile.  If you lose all the dirt (wich more often than not you will), don't worry about it, as long as you aren't "tearing" the roots apart it will be fine.

Once they are sepearte, you put one back in the hole and fill the void with the soil you just dug them up with.  Be sure to pack the soil around the plant firmly.  Don't crush the roots, but give the plant a nice firm seating.

Make sure you firm up your soil in your starter trays as well.  The last step is to water.  I am not going to photoshop or edit any of these, this is exactly how they looked when I watered.  I wasn't concened with them "laying down" because for one thing, they are vines, but also more importantly I knew that I had firmed up the plants footing propertly and I didn't have to worry!

These are the same plants a little over a week later:

So the morale of the story is, you can not only do this, but you can make a little cash doing it as well.  I haven't sold a large amount of them, but I have sold enough to have many times the money it took me to start the seed.  Hind sight is always 20-20 but in the future I think I will just start the seeds in the cells like normal people do!

Thanks for reading and as always, "Keep on Digging!"


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