3.5″ McConkey Square Nursery Pots
Many seedlings can indeed go straight from a standard 72-cell tray straight into the gardening after a short hardening-off period. Unfortunately some of the most commonly grown vegetables such as tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants fare much better when they have the time and space to develop strong root systems before setting them out into the unpredictable Midwest springs that we have been experiencing lately.
These are the sturdiest transplant pots I could find. They are just the right balance of rigid and flexible. I have hundreds of these and have only broken one when I dropped a tomato transplant and the corner of the pot hit the garage floor just right.
The holes in the bottom are large enough to permit adequate drainage and prevent root rot, but small enough to prevent much soil from falling through the bottom. The pots are tapered and 18 fit perfectly in a standard “1020” tray.
The manufacturer offers these pots in 3.5″ and 5.5″ sizes. The 3.5″ pot is plenty large enough for any vegetable that you would be transplanting into your garden. The larger size could be useful if you wanted to sell larger tomato or pepper starts or flowers later in the spring to those who got a late start.
At the end of the season, I washed my pots out with a hose and stacked them in a box in my unheated, uninsulated pole barn. The plastic didn’t appear to become weaker despite being out in the cold when I unpacked them in February.
You can get away without using these and transplanting your warm season (tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, okra, etc.) vegetables directly from the typical smaller cells, but you will get earlier production and have much more robust plants if they have more time to establish themselves in the controlled environment of your house or garage.
