Thanks for the heads up. I've grown other seeds with that reputation. The trick is to make sure you don't bend or damage the roots. I've had good success with making sure the potting medium where the seedling is going is moist but crumbly to a very fine texture. I then keep as much of the potting medium on the seedling as I can and tease just enough of a hole with a toothpick into the new pot that the seedling will fit without the roots being bent. I do NOT tamp it down. I use the toothpick to snug it up a bit then take a mister and spray around the base of the seedling. Also, should add that my fingers never touch the seedling, I use a modified pair of tweezers I make just for fragile seedlings using broom straw.
Many years ago I worked in a museum in the vertebrate paleontology department. I used to mine very fine matrix for teeny tiny mammalian structures such as ear bones of shrews and mice (I had extraordinary visual acuity for shape and color so didn't have to use a magnifier). All the implements we were using ended up crushing the bones unless you were very, VERY careful. I had a brainstorm one day and attached a broom straw that had been split in half then the ends slightly flattened to the end of some tweezers. As it turned out, you could now grab the structures tightly and the straw would give way without breaking them but still hold on. The key as to how much give the straw had was in the length. The shorter the straw, the more pressure was exerted, the longer the less. As it turned out after experimentation, about 4 inches was good for grabbing teeny tiny labyrinths without shattering them. The 4 inches being the length from the tips of the tweezers, so of course the broom straw itself was usually about 6 inches with the other two inches used to attach the straw to the tweezers.
Anyway, I found that using my broom straw tweezers worked just find for picking up seedlings.
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