How to Protect Transplants in The Garden

I live in vermont which is zone 4. I like to use transplants in the garden. I use tomatoes, cucumbers squash, mellons etc. small transplants are sometimes hard to grow in the garden, This is something I tried this summer and it works great How to grow plants using plastic soda bottles. I found clear plastic 3 liter soda bottles work best. I grew cucumbers, squash in mine. I left the bottle on and they grew fine.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• shears , knife

1. Take a 3 quart (clear works best) soda bottle and cut off top and bottom. I used shears to cut the plastic top and bottom off.

2. Put transplant in garden and press bottle over and around transplant and twist bottle into ground.

3. You can put an inch or two of water in bottle. When plant gets bigger you can add more water each time. The bottle is nice in that its lets the water soke in slow to the plants roots.

Tips & Warnings

• Best to leave bottle on plant till its done growing. Plant grows up and out of bottle and grows normal, I found removing the bottle hurts the plants growth a lot, and leaving the bottle on does no hurt.

[dixie306]

on 12/21/2009 Great tips! 5*

[crgibs]

on 12/16/2009 My grandpa did something similar. He always transplanted his tomatoes into the garden in half-gallon cardboard milk cartons with the bottoms cut out. The top half protected the plants and the portion of the carton that was buried would decompose. Thanks for sharing your method!

[cadosh]

on 12/9/2009 great article on How to Protect Transplants in The Garden, 5*

[bahr94]

on 12/5/2009 Great tips, I never heard of doing it this way, 5 stars

[bahr94]

on 12/5/2009 Great tips, I never heard of doing it this way, 5 stars