Pricking out and potting on seedlings - the secrets of success!

If you grow flowers, you can put them straight into a container, it could be a small pot, it could be a large pot right there, and you can pick out individual blooms with the process and ensure you've got them all cooking out. Basically, lever the roots out individually. Fill up the compost. When you make a hole in the compost, what sometimes happens is you see these little roots, they've got a lot of static, they'll stick to the side of the compost and they won't go down. So what I do is I get a pen, rub it on my trousers and then, see this? Cleanse for the roots and just drop it into the hole. Then, you water them in. Some plants, sometimes, you soak in the dowel. Wildflower mixes, hydromeres, leaf greens, all those sorts of things. Six, five, six, seven seeds in the same container and they're up to a tonne. Same goes for leafy crops, you can grow them in sows, in small pots, keep the dowel, and the cluster plant makes one plant at a time. Herbs, like oregano, are great for cluster sowing. See what I've got there? Single cell, filled with dozens of seeds. Now, they've all come up and I can make lots of plants out of it. I could take them out individually, like I did with the chrysanthemum. The issue with that is, is it takes ages for the plant to fill out its container. So what I do instead, is rip up the clumps. I don't want to say really, it doesn't harm the roots at all. In fact, ripping is better than cutting because you maintain more of that root system. It pulls it apart and takes clumps like that to make large pots. I've got this, which is something like a one litre. Fill up the pot with compost, drop that in the middle, and the roots of this will soon spread out. Fill that out, and you'll be ready to plant it. And that will be a bonny little pot of oregano. One other way to sow, particularly useful if you're making vegetable beds, or filling out your bed shelves, is in cell trays. Now these are my chili peppers, they're still coming on. What I did was I sowed two seeds of each variety, lots of different varieties, in the cell trays. And then they come off, and when they're big enough, they can go on into individual pots to plant them out after the frost. The thing is, when you have different varieties grown in cell trays, you can see the runners and riders are all a different paper. So you've got to hoik out the ones that are ready. Take example, this big fella here. Before, the tiddlers next to it, you don't want to go pushing underneath through the hole, because that's a bit of a pain. You can do that, push up through like that to get them out. What I do is just get a pan or a fork, pop that into the compost, and just lever the whole lot up like that. No fuss, no stress. And it means that I can hoik out all the biggest ones, pop them on, leaving the tiddlers to find their feet, spread their roots, and fill out the pots.