Producing ‘good quality’ vegetable transplants demands a series of horticultural practices and interventions which overall enable the raise of plant from start to finish by slow, steady, uninterrupted growth and with minimal stress and guarantee appropriate growth rate, optimum root to shoot ratio, good stand establishment capabilities and high yield potentials of new plantlets. Because growth of vegetabl transplant is a summary of many interacting and confounding factors which moderate each other, rather than following standardized recommendations, good quality vegetable seedlings can only be produced through careful selection of substrate, or substrate mixtures, appropriate manipulations of temperature regime, fertilization regime, the module size and transplanting age, and proper combination of plant growth promoters and growth control and hardening techniques.
Keywords: substrate, peat substitutes, module size, transplant age, fertilization, plant biostimulants, hardening