Picking up some transplants at your local nursery this spring? Here are a few tips for buying healthy seedlings that will grow and thrive in your garden…

Whether you don’t have the time or space to start your own seeds, or you just need to fill in a few extra plants in your garden this year, sometimes buying seedlings or transplants from a nursery can be a good option for giving your garden a head start.

However, be sure to use caution, as if the seedlings you buy aren’t healthy, they may die rather than turning into healthy, productive plants in your garden. Even worse, you could bring pests or diseases into your garden! This happened to me once – I bought a few pepper plants one year from a local nursery to supplement the ones I planted from seed that didn’t germinate well, and ended up with horrible pepper blight that impacted my entire pepper crop for the next two seasons.

In the short video below, Stacey Murphy of Grow Your Own Vegetables explains how to make sure you are buying healthy seedlings that are actually healthy and disease-free: