The little seedlings in the seed pots are crying out for me to do something with them. This is the time of year that I find it best to transplant seedlings out into the garden; they just seem to be able to go into winter more easily with a few months’ growth.
Sphaeralcea munroana, left, and S. parviflora, right. Or is it the other way around?
Of course I could wait for those autumn rains that everyone talks about. It would be a long, long wait. Instead, since I know I don’t live in a place where it rains in the autumn, reliably anyway, I’ll plant them out, stick flags next to them, water the daylights out of them, and push them back into the ground if they try to escape after frost heaves them out of the ground.
If left in the pots outside over the winter, the plants might live, and then again, they might not. I don’t know enough about root hardiness to say anything either way.
The other choices are to have my garden staff (oh, wait …..), that is, for me prick out the seedlings and plant them extra carefully and watch the little plants die in a day, or plant out the whole pot. Planting out the whole pot is the smart thing to do. I do a lot of stupid things (and not just in the garden, either), so doing something smart might come as a surprise to the little plants and they just might live.
the miserable gardener 