Transplant containers serve to hold the soil and roots of the transplant in a nice, tidy package, but they fail to allow for the production of the kind of roots that help transplants recover quickly from the shock suffered when you remove them from the containers to plant them out. To the original designers of planting containers, roots were roots. Surprisingly little has been done to improve containers since those first designs. Yet the container makes or breaks the transplant.
The success of transplanting depends heavily on causing little or no damage to the root system. However, a second key point overlooked by early container designers is that root balls need to have many, healthy feeder roots on their surface. These feeder roots, essentially smaller roots with fine hairs, are extremely important to producing the best-ever transplants. You see, feeder roots are the part of the root system through which the plant takes up water and nutrients.
