All sorts of factors can stunt or impede the growth of the seedlings you lovingly transplant into your garden. Low soil fertility, specific nutritional deficiencies (eg. nitrogen), too much or too little water, root or vascular disease…
A common factor is the timing of transplanting them out of pot/punnet, and into your garden soil.
If we allow our seedlings to get too large, or to get to the point where their roots are struggling for room in the pot or punnet, or to where the plant is forced to prematurely divert its energy from vegetative growth (vigorously growing stem and leaves) to generative growth (flowers and then fruit), we really set them back.
This has happened big time to us this year. Wendy faithfully grew our tomato, eggplant, capsicum, cucumber seedlings, etc. as normal, timing them for transplant in September. But I didn’t get the beds for many of them ready before their optimal time for transplanting. They stayed in their seedling trays way longer than ideal. Some of the tomato’s started flowering, some got leaf disease, others just got root bound and stopped growing. Tragically some are still waiting to get out!!
But even relatively small delays have tangible results. Take capsicums & eggplants for example. I got some planted right on time! They are growing nicely, plenty of healthy vegetative growth, and lots of flowers and tiny fruit. See photo above.
The photo below are of another bed of capsicum & eggplant I planted 2 weeks later than their mates. You can see they are nowhere near as advanced, are more spindly, and not booming out of the ground. The seeds of all of these plants came out of the same batch, were planted by Wendy on the same day, came out of the germinator the same day, were treated exactly the same all the way through their infant and toddler life, but the smaller ones were let out of Wendy’s tender embrace and went into the ground 2 weeks later. I think they will do OK, but may not reach their full potential.
If you have seedlings ready to go out, but you don’t have the space for them ready yet, pot them up - transfer them into a larger container with more space for their roots and more nutrients so they can continue growing without constraint until you are ready to transplant.
And if somebody (Wendy), sees clearly that you (me) won’t get the beds ready in time, and offers to pot them up for you (me), don’t be a mug (me) and tell them (Wendy) “No, I think I’ll get them in OK.” Just let her pot them up!!!
Rod