Plant nurseries and the overall nursery environment are where seedlings spend only a brief portion of their life. Yet they are influential in guiding the root microbiome composition, influencing the success of seedlings planted to new environments. These early life consortia represent the first plant-microbial interactions and networks that are established. However, it is unclear how much of these microbial cohorts are retained once seedlings are moved into new environments that have different physiochemical and bioclimatic properties. In this study, 9 month old Pinus radiata seedlings from a single nursery were moved into different sites across New Zealand and were left to establish for 7 years prior to re-sampling. A targeted sequencing approach was used to investigate bacterial and fungal community structure before and after translocation. A null model was used to partition the relative influence of stochastic and deterministic processes within root microbiomes of seedlings in the nursery and 7-years upon translocation by using the nursey as the point of reference. Results indicate significant shifts of the bacterial and fungal root microbiome across all sites (p<0.001) and blocks (p<0.001) compared to the nursery. Assembly of both bacterial and fungal root communities were dominated by stochastic processes, with ecological drift underpinning much of this (i.e. 44.9-77.8%). Overall, < 10% of the nursery root microbiome was retained for both bacteria and fungi. These findings have important implications for the forest industry as it helps guide decisions on the need for inducing the early root microbiomes with beneficial microbes which can help set future trajectories in the forest.