Hello everyone. Welcome back to the Epic Gardening Podcast. It's me Kevin Espiritu. I'm here to talk today about a particular

misunderstanding about the root systems of many plants or most plants.

So let's talk sort of about the commonly held wisdom and why it may or may not be the case.

So you'll often hear that when you transplant you

want to not disturb your roots, you want to just take the whole lump of soil and

roots and just put it into its new home and that's something that you'll see people talk about quite a bit and just you know

keep that root ball intact put it in the next pot and it's good to go.

Well the truth is a little bit different.

The gentle handling of roots is usually good when you're dealing with Mitzlaius, a seedling or an annual flower or vegetable,

something that's very delicate that you've started from seed.

But if you have a containerized plant, something that you've gotten from a nursery,

oftentimes you're not buying it at its peak right so it's going to have a pretty

serious issue with its root system as a result of either just sitting there for

too long or maybe it was potted up in a bad way that didn't

support the health of that plant. So I'm sure all of you know that when you grab a

plant out of its pot and you see the circling root system, that's just not a good situation.

That's known as a girdling rooted or can become girdling roots, which leads to the early death

of what normally would be a healthy plant.

So what you want to do is remember that when we prune our plants,

when we prune the top growth of our plants, that spurs on new growth. So the same logic applies to the root system,

roots that are pruned during transplant when you're moving it from one pot to

another, one container to a raised bed, whatever the case may be,

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