Potting Up Seedlings 101: Easy Seed Starting Tip!

What's going on everyone? Kevin from Epic Gardening here. As you can see, I've got 24 seed starts in these smaller little trays. This is where these seeds began their life. We're going to pot them up into larger pots and I'm going to show you exactly how I do that. So first, potting soil wise, it's just a light porous, well draining potting mix. You can see there's some vermiculite in here, very light and airy, very similar to this except for this does have a bit of compost in it. Whereas this is more of an inert medium for seed starting. So we're actually going to start feeding this with a little bit of nutrition. And honestly it's very simple as far as the process goes. It's very similar to seed starting except for the fact that the hole you're digging is a little bit bigger and I'm going to do something a little special here. And then you're also just kind of popping this out with a knife. But the first thing I like to do, and this is something that I'm experimenting with, is doing a little pre-inoculation. So this is Azospirillium brasilensi. It's from Extreme Gardening and it's actually called Azos. The product is called Azos. I've done a little bit of split testing and I've seen that the results of using it versus not using it skew pretty heavily towards me wanting to use it. So it's basically a microbial or, or yeah, it's a, it's a bacterial I believe inoculant if I'm correct. It could be, could be fungal but I don't think so. I think it's bacterial. So what I like to do is I come out with a knife and you want this to be nice and watered so this, this soil doesn't just crumble apart. Come in, we'll try to retain that soil as best we can. You can see nice healthy roots right there. I'm going to pop it right down in there and press it down. Give it a little bit of compression. Of course, not too much because we do not want to suffocate the roots. But there we have it. We have one of our luffa gourds transplanted in very nicely. It's going to grow much better as compared to in here cause it's, you know, it's a bit past size for being in a pot like this. So we'll move it to the side. I really love potting up in a row because then I'm not confusing plants. Of course these look quite different than the nasturtiums right here or than these tomatoes. These are glacier tomatoes that I'm going to be potting up. But let's go ahead and get rid of the rest of these. Alrighty, we're potted up. Time to give these guys a little rain from above. Just enough to get them nice and wet and work some of that inoculant in there, as well as sort of form the soil around the transplant just in case it wasn't quite enough. And actually see these tomatoes dangling here? I didn't plant these deep enough. So I'm going to have to plant the tomatoes a little bit deeper. That was my mistake. Tomatoes are one of the few plants that you can plant quite deep and they're going to, they're going to throw roots out all the way around. So everything else looks good. Tomatoes I'm going to have to replant. Alrighty, that's better on these tomatoes. I just added a little bit more soil, kept them nice and propped up and that's going to enable a little bit more root development across the stems here, which is going to make just overall a healthier plant. That's about it for potting up guys. It's a pretty simple process. Now if you are in a colder climate, you're going to want to of course be hardening these off if you're planning to bring them outside. I'm in a climate where my seed starting area is roughly the same temperature as my outdoor area, which is not that cold at all. It's, it's San Diego zone 10b really, really warm, especially even right now, it's March 16th and temperatures are upwards of 70 degrees. So that's not a process that I personally in my zone have to worry about. If it is a process you have to worry about in your zone, the way to think about hardening off for your seedlings and your transplants after you've potted them up, trying to size them up, get them acclimated to the outdoors is to take them in and out for increasing increments of time. So day one, you take them out maybe an hour or two. Day two, another hour, all the way up to about day seven or so when they can stay outside for about eight hours a day. At that point that they're pretty well acclimated to the outdoor environment, they've been experiencing some cold stress, some wind stress, the natural change of the sun and the light dark cycle of mother nature. And so they'll be perfectly fine to then transplant outside. So that's just a really quick summary overview of the hardening off process. But potting up, done. Thank you so much for watching. If you have any suggestions, questions, or comments, please leave them in the comment box down below. I'll see you on the next one. Good luck in the garden and keep on growing.