 Welcome to Getting Clean on the Prairies. Today I'm just down here in my indoor growing space and I'm just looking over my petunias that I had started from seed. I've made a couple videos about how I've started these from seed and then transplanted them into these three-inch pots and I've had them under the grow lights about two or three plants per pot and they are really getting pretty tight in here and I see that they are starting to shoot out some blooms as well. But we are still a good six weeks from being able to put these outdoors. So I just want to try and slow them down a bit. I'm going to start off by topping off and pruning some of these blooms back. It should create a thicker, more fuller plant, but then I also need to separate these into bigger pots. So I went out to my shed greenhouse to see what I have for pots that I can up-pot these to and I have a bunch of these. But I do like to put these into my bigger planters and barrels outside. So I'm going to try to keep them flourishing here, but to give them some growing room I'm just going to pop one out. You can see that there is some roots coming out the bottom. I'm just going to see if I can have a look at see what kind of roots we got going here. Wow! These things are getting very root-bound. You can see the, when they start kind of circling around that they are trying to go somewhere and need some more room. So first of all, I am going to top them off. Then I'm going to give them a drink of some weed concentrate here. Petunias are heavy feeders and I have only been giving them water so far, so I think they probably need some fertilizer and a little boost to keep them going. So I'm just going to take my clippers here and clip away some of these flowers. Just going to go above. I don't know if you can see this here. I'm just going to go above a set of leaves here and just clip these away. Another mistake I made when I started these was I didn't keep them very well marked as far as colors. I had red, I had red and white, I had white, I had purple, pink. Some of them were miniature type petunias, so it's going to be a variety this year. I'm not really going to have any themes going with specific colors because until they start blooming, I guess some of them may bloom before I get them outside. I can figure out what colors they are. I'm very excited that these have turned out so well. I have tried to do these from seed last year and they didn't do too well, but if you check out my videos, they actually were fairly easy to get going. I used my grow box that I made to get these started and I just used a large tray of seed starting mix and sprinkled the seeds throughout because they're very tiny seeds. And they sprouted within about a week. And before they got too big, I just pulled them out of the tray and up-pottered them into here, into these three inch containers. Petunias are a great flower here to grow in this, in my zone here, zone three. They're very hardy. They can withstand a little bit of frost and they bloom continuously all summer long, as long as you prune them down and give them some food occasionally. They're great to have in your pots outdoors and they're also very easy to collect seeds from so you can replant them every year and not have to purchase from the greenhouse. I spend a lot of money on flowers at greenhouses, so this year I'm excited that I will won't be buying as many petunias, I don't think. I'm gonna mix up a container of this seaweed fertilizer into my watering can here and give them a drink today. Let them adjust to the the shock of being chopped down and then tomorrow I will get them into some bigger pots. So I'm just gonna put these back under the grow lights here, so I will just let this soak up all this water today and next time I bring you back, we will up-pot these into bigger pots. Okay, so let's get potting up some of these petunias. I'm gonna show you how it's done here. I have a big container full of potting mix. I'm just gonna moisten this up with a little bit of water. So you want it just moist enough that it kind of holds together when you squeeze it, but it's not dripping with any water. Okay, so here we got one of our plants that we're gonna take apart and just one thing about petunias and most flowers, they're pretty easy to rip apart without doing too much damage. There's lots of roots here and I can see that I have three separate plants here, so I'm just gonna gently rip them apart. Try to contain as much roots with each as you can. So you got one here, lots and lots of roots and this third one here. So I've got a bunch of these four-inch pots. Some of them are kind of beat up, but I try to reuse them for as many years as I can. This might be the last year for this one, but I just partially filled up the pot with some potting soil and then I'm just going to set it in here, try to get all its roots inside and spread some dirt around it. Sorry, it's a little messy, but these will eventually look better in a few days once they start growing again. And this should be able to just stay in this pot until I'm ready to plant it outside in my containers or in my flower beds. I'm going to be just bottom watering these, so I will be just putting them in a tray and it'll be soaking up the water from the bottom. It also makes it much easier to tear these parts when the soil is moistened, so make sure your pots aren't too dry when you're taking them out, otherwise the roots kind of and the dirt kind of falls away. So you want it to be nice and wet so it sticks together better. And if you don't have pots like I have, another thing that works really well is these plastic cups or the red solo cups. What I've done with these, I used these last year, I just take a pair of scissors and snip away just a couple cuts on the bottom so that when you bottom water, of course, it can draw, wick up the water that way. So these work good, they're nice and deep and you can put your plants in those too. It's a cheap way of doing it without having to go and buy a bunch of pots. You can see this one is really, really root-bound here. Just gently pull it to try and keep as much roots with each plant as you can. You kind of want to do it right in the pot like this or else you're going to have dirt everywhere. And these are going to be taking up a lot of space now indoors, so I think it's time to move them out to my garage, which is it's a heated garage. It's fairly warm out there now and I got some some big windows so I can put these on the shelf out there and they'll hang out there until it's time to move outdoors. Also, just make sure that you press down your soil so you don't have any air pockets in there as well. So it's just another tip to keep in mind. I will keep pinching off the flowers probably for another week or two just to let these get really well established and focus all their energy on their roots. Instead of flowering and then when it gets closer to moving them outdoors, that's when I'll just let the flowers come and then I'll be able to identify what color they are too, hopefully by then too. I probably pick up, you know, half a dozen or ten or so packs of petunias every year for my barrels because I use a lot. So these are the one kind of flower that I definitely will try to collect seeds and grow myself. But if I was to try to grow every type of flower that I usually like to buy, that could take up a lot of my time. So petunias are going to be my focus for this year. Okay, so here is the final home for my petunias. This is where they're going to hang out till they get outside. They're in a south-facing window here in my garage and there are quite a few more petunias than I expect it. So I've got quite a few here and they are taking up a lot of valuable growing space here. So I better rethink how many other flowers I want to plant indoors and try not to have so much success and so many plants. So if you want to find out how these flowers do and kind of watch the progress till we get them outside along with all my other indoor starts, please don't forget to hit the subscribe button. Please leave a comment and hit that notification bell so that you can be notified when the next video is up on the channel. Thanks for watching!