 In today's part of the series, we are going to be talking about how you get your seed started for transplanting. So we are going to cover exactly how to plant them into trays as well as taking them once they are in their growth stage, how to get them into the garden with success. So transplanting does take a little bit more effort and care and maintenance in the beginning. So it's going to be a balance as to whether you're really trying to get a jump on the season, get ahead of your growing season so that you're putting things out right when it's able to go out into the garden. It does give you that leadway and you'll get a lot longer of a growing season but it does take more time. So if you know that you're only going to be able to spend so much time in the garden it may just be better to wait it out direct so once your weather warms up and plant it directly into the garden because this step while it does have advantages and gets you growing earlier it does take more maintenance and work. Yeah and with this pack what I'd really recommend is a combination of direct sowing and transplanting. Doing both for many of them also just creates that little bit of bit of diversity that helps to ensure success. For example I've had issues with cutworms and they would cut down my little seedlings but by growing them bigger and then adding them to the garden later that helped a lot. So my recommendation is definitely if you have the time and the energy and the excitement do some direct transplanting and do sorry direct seeding and transplanting but there are a few that you only want to do as transplants and not direct sow and we're going to go ahead and we're actually going to plant those out and show you just how to do that. When you're looking at seed starting supplies there's a couple of different ways to approach transplanting seeds into the garden. This here is a 10-20 tray it is a very very common way to start seeds it's it's very easily accessible from big box stores online retailers any sort of garden equipment supply stores they will all have 10 20 or lots of people have them just get some used ones from the people around you upcycle and what this does is it gives you a space that takes up less space but it's allowing you to get the germination to get those roots just starting to form the soil depth is not very deep it's just enough to get them started in their their gardening journey or their growing journey. So this is a good place if you're trying to grow a lot and you and you don't want to have you know 10 or 15 of these trays around you can start them here it saves you some space it gets the germination you need in a controlled environment so that you can then put them into four by four pots if you'd like or into the garden so it gives you that little bit of wiggle room a little bit of a head start without taking up quite as much room. And what we've actually laid out here if you wanted to do transplanting with all of the ones that can be transplanted you would need about two trays full of pots which is about what did we say 32 pots yeah so if you wanted to transplant some of every single one of the seeds that can be transplanted that don't really need to be direct sown you would just need two trays and about 32 pots. Now if you wanted to do like a substantial amount you could have I would say about six trays and you know about 32 pots or or as much as like say 60 pots and that would really cover you super substantially for your for your two four by beds. Yep that's plenty of wiggle room for things to not make it and still have more than enough to fill the beds. So what we're going to do is we're going to go ahead and plant this tray and show you just how you would do it with your seeds. So when you're planting into 1020 trays we're basically going to be using that trench method that we shared in the direct sow video. So very shallow depending on the seed depth just like before but we're going to be taking our finger and we're basically creating little mini lines or trenches. We're not thinking about plant spacing or anything like that with the seeds we're not trying to give them four inches apart that's not the point of a 1020 tray. So what we're going to do is we're going to just make our little our little furrows or trenches into the soil. We have our furrows or our trenches and so now it's time to plant and it's going to vary a little bit depending on the pack but we're trying to go for as little of it as possible as lightly sprinkled in as possible maybe like a quarter ish of the pack with the herb pack with the herb pack. So we're going to be sprinkling this into the hand to make it easier to access and as I said before it's kind of like just barely as lightly as possible. You can tease roots apart but ideally we're trying to give them a little bit of space to get their their germination started. So as lightly as possible in this trench and this gently covering things back up and this is going to apply for all three of the varieties that we have examples of the basil and the kale. Yeah we're going to go ahead and do the basil and the kale as well. And when we're doing this this is the same seed depth as recommended in the seed resources guide so if you're unsure you know what you're planting how far apart or whatever remember the spacing does not apply with this 1020 tray. So there's the basil I probably used for this there's 200 basil seeds so I probably used about a quarter of the pack for the basil so that's probably about 50 or so seeds right here with the basil that I'm just out planting I probably did around 25 seeds or so in this row. I might try it since they are a little larger it's easier to do like you know one to two as you're going whereas the real small seed is just so fine like kind of sprinkles lightly as possible with it. Now I'm going to show how to put the seeds into these little pots and there's a pretty big difference here in the trays you're scattering in a whole lot of seeds but in the pots you're actually planting this so that they're going to be in here for longer and they're going to grow into more established plants so you're going to put less seeds in there. So I'm going to go ahead and do kale first and I'm only going to be putting two seeds into each of these now if you're having if you're working with the more abundant seeds like for example the mustard you could do three or four but with the kale I'm just going to do two you generally get a 90 plus germination right and for that I'm just going to go ahead and put a little divot there and then I'm going to go ahead and plant two. Now do you do it that style or would you just plant two right together? The roots will fill the pot regardless of where they're placed in it so it just makes thinning it down to one easier later if you separate it like this you can certainly just put it in the middle it just makes snipping them off a little easier when they're separated. Okay so I'm just making little divots and planting you know one kale per whole. And this is basically like a security blanket you only want one per pot in the in the final transplanted to the garden this is its spacing by planting two you're making sure that if something happens you still know that you have what you were intending. Nice. So when we are watering them in it's the same as before we're going to be gently watering as best we're able getting the soil evenly moist keeping it dry watering ideally one bare minimum once a day ideally twice a day if you have the time this is basically just like direct sowing into the garden you still have to make sure that we have adequate water until they germinate until they have a root system to better support their their growth. And that is one of the benefits of transplanting is it is easier to water them and to take care of them for those first few weeks because they're all packed together in this one spot. You can also control the temperature a lot more with trays which is the advantage of transplanting if you know it's cold or it's hot in the garden things may dry the soil may dry out quicker here we can control the environment just a little bit more. So here we have a couple of different examples of plants that we've put into trays and pots to show you the different transplants. So here we started these just two weeks ago and you'll see there's eight different plants here and that's because there's four that we would say you only direct seed so we've only done the eight that you would definite that you can transplant. So here we have onion this is chive I've had the hardest time with chive you might have a harder time with chive as well and then here we have the basil this one here is the arugula then we have the kale this is the dill here is the mustard green mix and then this is the herb mix now these are the plants that were either planted directly into these pots or up planted from a tray into the pots so here we have some of the bunching onion this is the chives and this one here in particular is the garlic chives which is in the chive mixture it has the flat leaves then we have a few different basils this is your italian basil we have the holy basil right here so good just to smell and then we have the lemon basil right here then we have two different kales here you have your your russian kale and then you have your lasonado or dinosaur kale and then as far as the herb mix goes you have your lemon balm your chamomile and your oregano and there's another video in the series about getting to know the young plants where I dive into being able to identify each of the plants and being able to separate out the packs because some of these are mixtures like the like the herb mixture and the basil mixture as well as the mustard mixture and so refer to that video for getting to know the plants a little bit more in their younger stages so now that we have all of these ready to go started this would be moving into pots potentially once they're thinned and allowed to grow a little bit more they can be direct transplanted typically this is going to be potted up before moving into the garden so these are still on the small size correct so this is not ready to go into the ground yet however these are how do we get them from our 1020 trays or any sort of condensed planting into our pots this is a term called potting up and it's basically giving it more room than the soil it has here to give it a little bit more growth until it's ready to get put into the garden so this is a pretty sensitive stage this concept allows you to grow a lot in a small space to get it started but it is possible potential likely to disturb root systems at this point so a few things when you are transplanting is to get the soil nice and moist it helps you allow to tease apart roots a little bit easier you also want to go directly into the watered soil pots waiting for them and also not leaving them in between from A to B too long that exposure to the air can really stress the plants out so we're going directly from our watered soil here into our pots that are ready and waiting as you're teasing the soil apart you're basically just going to kind of take a finger and stick it right under the plant and kind of just gently wiggle and and bring it up to the soil and you'll find that it comes out with roots and a little bit of soil more often than not and when we're doing this we're generally well with the general rule of thumb is that we're waiting until the plant has its first true leaves and so do you want to mention the baby leaves versus the true leaves so this is the root system that's developed from this baby plant and when it first germinates it's going to have what's called cotyledone or baby leaves and more often than not they look nothing like the adult leaves so those leaves come up when it first germinates and then the true leaves come through the center and that is your indicator that the plant is ready to go from here to here so when you're digging your hole these are not going to be seeds anymore we're not thinking about the size of the seed this has a deep root system and so at this point we can use that finger to go down and create a little hole or an area for this to get planted into you're going to lower your roots into the soil very delicately putting it in and these can get planted a little bit deeper than where it was in these pots but not by much we're not going up to the to the the true leaves or anything like that we're just going maybe a quarter to and half a half an inch depending on how leggy they are up the stem so leggy let's talk a little bit about leggy um legginess is what's going to happen if they are not if they're having to reach for the sun while they're in this stage and the the stalk will get long and and it'll get leggy so this is a good example here um this is a kale and this is on the leggy side I would say right so um you can see how it's like pretty long this was reaching for the sun so as Elise said when it is leggy then you can bury it a little bit deeper but otherwise you just bury it at the same depth of soil level or just a little bit deeper right correct you just can't help yourself so we're going to start talking about time frames and how to get them into the garden so depending on your weather how early in the season you're starting things how much sunlight is available that kind of thing you're going to be looking at a couple of weeks but more likely four to six weeks depending on the plants we have some reference points and like that um in the reference guide but you're going to be looking for a few indicators as to when those plants are ready first question is always frost don't put anything into the garden if you're still at risk for that so always season seasonality is first then if the plant itself is ready and so what we're looking for is we're looking for nice robust growth we want to see that that has several branches several large leaves on here the kale for example has at least three to five leaves that means it's getting ready to to go in the garden it's got an a below ground root system that's ready to handle it if you're unsure you can always give it a tip test so if you were to tip it out and gently squeeze you should have roots that hold the soil together you don't want it to be crazy curly root bounds that's too far but this is very close this is very close this is definitely ready to be in the ground but i wouldn't call this root bound at this point okay so what we're looking for is a nice network of roots the soil holds itself together if i were to have taken this off and the soil falls apart that's your indicator that that plant has not had enough time let's take a look at this kale as well since we've got it here this is an older kale and it's you're you can see there's a dense network these are both very much ready to go in the ground as soon as that happens all of these roots that have curled in are going to shoot out and establish a nice robust root system in the garden bed so how do we transplant what we're going to have is our soil already in place fertilizer well rounded soil and i like to plant into soil that's already been watered it doesn't have to be a heavy watering it helps keep the soil whole as you're digging and it also allows the plant to not have quite as much of a shock heading into the soil if it's bone dry it's literally just going to wick all of that moisture away and on the same note we we want to have the transplants watered before we add them to the soil as well absolutely yeah and while we're mentioning that also your ideal time for transplanting is going to be either in the evening or in the morning not the middle of the day like we are showing you right now the video yeah ideally it's going to be going in in the evening time that gives it a little bit of time to get itself situated before it's in dealing with the heat of the day so when we're ready to put the plant into the ground we know that this one we've already showed you the tip test is ready it's ready to get in we're going to be putting the plants at the depth of the soil it's that's already in there so we do not want to see this go into a deep hole that gets buried halfway up the stem as well as having it maybe let's say not a deep enough hole and and part of this pot sticking out we we want it to be equal and level to the soil that we're planting into the garden bed so as we're planting this in you may have heard like plant you know dig out a hole two times the size of the pot that none of that applies when we're doing little starts into the garden because this is all loose um high quality garden soil so we're digging it out and test it out if if it goes in and it's still sticking out dig some more you don't want it to be sticking above the grounds now at this point we want to make sure that the the pot the soil goes in all the way around whenever there's roots exposed to air that's an incredible shock for the plant itself and we don't want that to happen so when you're tucking the soil back in kind of go down along the edges making sure that the whole plant all the way down and around has the soil that it needs to keep the roots covered at this point it's a water it in and wait you're going to be wanting to water at least once a day and then slowly backing off from there so you want to water once a day once you start seeing a little bit of new growth go every other day then once it's you give it maybe another week or so then you can back off to maybe every third day and now watering's not a percent like it's going to vary based on florida to you know the mountains of north carolina and vice versa there's going to be some nuances but generally speaking every day when you first plant it into the garden and slowly backing off as you see that the plant isn't showing signs of heat stress or water stress so there you have it that is how to plant the plants into the trays and into the pots how to care for them how to know when they're ready to be put into the garden and then how to do it and one thing that I want to mention is again some of these some of these little baggies of seeds that you get are mixtures and if you want to really get the abundance out of this pack you can learn those mixtures which is in the step-by-step guide and it's also mentioned in the getting to know the young plants because for example in this herb mix you have your lemon balm you have your chamomile and you have your oregano and you can easily tell these apart and then plant them into their own pots and get so much more out of your pack there's about five different basils as they get their first true leaves you can tell the difference of them and you can have five different basils in your garden and then there's three different mustards including an Asian green so if you really want to get the most out of your pack you can separate those out and transplant them and really increase the abundance of the pack so there you go next video is you'll have to wait to see because we don't remember