 Hello, dear friends. Today we are in the garden and we are going to learn about seedlings, also called young plants. And I'm really excited to be able to show you a few different examples that are going to help you to become more comfortable, get to know the plants a little better. And one of the other reasons why this is important is in case when you've planted these, you mislabel them or you forget to label them or you have volunteers popping up in the garden. So really what this is about is just getting you a little more comfortable and a little connected to these plants after you've planted them and after they've come up, getting to know them a little more. So first, I'm going to introduce you to some plants that are about two and a half weeks old. That's what I'm holding here. And then I'm going to introduce you to some plants that are about four weeks old, which is what I'm holding here. And then I'm going to take you to two of the demonstration gardens I've started. One of them I planted from seed and the other was from transplants, which these are transplants. And of course, everything that I'm working with today are the exact same seeds that you've received in your seed packs. Before getting started, I just want to share one thing and that is, of course, I am going to make mistakes. Some people look at me as this extremely experienced gardener who maybe they assume knows everything, but I do not know everything. I have been gardening for five years. I've even grown and foraged 100% of my food for a year. So yes, I do have a lot of experience with plants, but I forget things. I'm constantly learning and I'm excited to share that because I actually still remember what it's like to be a beginner gardener. Five years ago, I didn't I didn't know what these looked like when they were babies. And so I'm excited to be able to, yes, have quite a bit of knowledge, but also to be a humble beginner gardener like you with you and be able to share in that way. So please be patient with me. I'm going to make some mistakes, but I am definitely going to lead you towards more success in the garden. And if you make some mistakes and we make some mistakes together, that's great because making mistakes is how you become an experienced gardener. So first we have radish and radish is one of the fastest growing. So it's going to be one of the bigger ones. You have these first little leaves that come out. These are not true leaves. These are the first like little seedling leaves. And as a beginner myself, sometimes I don't remember the names of everything. It doesn't matter. These are the first leaves that come out as they come up from seed. But then you have the first true leaves and with radish, that's going to be these kind of fuzzy leaves. Some leaves are fuzzy, some aren't. I can feel on this one right here a good amount of fuzz. So that's radish here. Next is turnip. Turnip is definitely similar to radish. It comes out with these first leaves and then you have the first true leaves, which also are kind of fuzzy as well. Radish is the purple top globe turnip. The purple top globe turnip has these purplish stems that you can see as well. So that's turnip. Next we have onion or bunching onion. And this is one of the ones that people know a lot. You can actually see the little seeds are still up here on top of a lot of them. They'll fall off eventually. You have these little green stems and you could actually eat one of these at this point. This is an edible green onion and if you taste it it's onion. So you can also identify these seedlings by how they taste. You can taste all of these seedlings except the flour mix and you probably could taste that too. And actually be able to tell what it is by taste as well, especially with onion. So speaking of tasting basil, if you eat one of your little, let me just go ahead and do it. Here's a little basil seedling and you can see I pulled it up by the root. You see the little roots going on there. Can you see that? Nice. So this is a little basil seedling and I'm going to go ahead and munch this. At that point it almost had a little bit of like in a licorice flavor but this one is indeed the Italian basil. Now there are four or five varieties of basil in the basil pack. This particularly is the Italian one because I separated some of them out. But this is your basil. So this is a stout green little sprout that comes up and oh it smells like basil too. I wish you could smell it. Okay next is chives and the chives is a mixture of garlic chives and your standard chives. Again looks very similar to onion. They're in the same family, alliums. They have little seeds that are still stuck on here but these will fall off. And the chives in my general view tend to be a little smaller than the onions but they do look very similar. So this is one you want to clearly label if you want to be able to tell. And they do have different spacing. So yes you definitely want to clearly label your chives and your onions. So that is your chives. Next another one that you could very easily identify by taste. Dill tastes the same here as it does later. Maybe a little stronger. So dill has these first leaves that come up that are these sort of land seal it like pointed leaves. The first leaves that come out are leaves that look like dill. Let me give one of these a little taste. Ooh that's dilly. Very. So that's dill. It's more of an upright, more thin as it starts to come out. And again all these ones that I'm showing you are about two and a half weeks old. That's going to vary depending on where you are. I'm here in warmer Florida. So now we have kale and there's three types of kale. So kale again has these initial first leaves that come out to gather some sun for energy. And then it puts out these leaves that very much look like kale leaves. So these are a little bit fuzzy as well. But I may as well go ahead and show you. There are three varieties of kale mixed into your pack. And this here is the white Russian kale. And this here is the Lasinato or dinosaur kale. And you can see the difference. But they can grow all the same. You don't have to be able to separate them out. I just did this because I'm learning and I want to be able to show you the different ones. But these come together in a mix. So that's kale. Next we have arugula. This is another brassica. So it comes out with these original young leaves. At that point it's really hard to tell those apart. But arugula starts to look like a mini arugula. So this little leaf. Let's see if we can see that. Can you see that? So that's a little baby arugula leaf. Very good. So that's arugula. And arugula is a very fast growing one. Next these are mustard greens. They do look similar to the arugula as well. At two and a half weeks you're really starting to see these are mustards though. You have the distinct mustard leaf as compared to the other ones. And because I'm tasting them I may as well go ahead and taste this as well. Yeah I just got the mustard flavor. So that is mustard. Okay next we have the flower mix. And so this is a mix I believe of 19 different flowers. The beneficial insect attractant mix. And so you'll see different ones popping up and I do not know the flowers really well yet. I've grown them before but I'm going to be learning them more as you're learning them right now with me. And the flower mix comes up with numerous different flowers in here. One of the mixes in here includes cilantro. So you may get a cilantro in your mix which is beautiful. And I see at least three or four different species growing in here. But this is what your flower mix will look like as it's coming up. And then lastly you have your herb mix. So you've got chamomile, oregano, and lemon balm. So this one right here that's popping up. What do you think that is? I'll give you a second. Chamomile, lemon balm, or Greek oregano. So this is chamomile. And chamomile is the fastest growing of the three. If you look in here you'll see that's either lemon balm or oregano down at the bottom. I can tell them apart by taste but not by sight. White yet when they're that small. But once they get bigger you can start to tell them apart. And you can see a slightly bigger one in there. And that's got to be lemon balm. Yup, that one right there is the lemon balm surrounded by the chamomile. Alright and then lastly we have carrot. And my batch of carrots that I planted the two and a half weeks ago or so did not succeed. So I pulled up a couple just so you can see. It has a similar first leaf coming out just like the dill. And then it has carrot-like leaves coming up. And you're going to see a little bit more carrots in the garden. So you don't have to pay too much attention to this one. It's not as ideal as the others. Okay now I want to go ahead and show you just a quick rundown of all of them lined up together. First we have radish. Now here we have turnip. Next is the bunching onion. Here we have the basil. Here we have chives. Here we have dill. Here we have kale. Here we have arugula. Here we have mustard greens. This is the flour mix. And then we have the herb mix. I wanted to go ahead and show you how much the onions and the chives look alike. Just so you can see that right next to each other. And then here I want to show you the brassicas. So when these five come up out of the ground when they just have those first leaves coming up. Kale, arugula, mustard greens, radish and turnip. They all look very similar first coming up. But as they start to get older they start to have their unique characteristics. As they start to have their first true leaves you start to be able to see the difference between them. So I wanted to show you that again at the beginning first like week, two weeks or so they're going to be very hard to tell apart. But they become easier to tell apart. So now I want to show you a little bit about the different mixtures. And again keep in mind you don't need to know anything about this. These are in their mixtures and you can just grow them as they are. But I'm sharing this in case you'd like to know because there are some benefits to knowing this. So for example in this basil pack there's a four or five different types of basil. And in this kale there's three or so different types of kale. And so you can actually learn to identify the different seedlings. So that way if you want to space them out differently you can. So first I want to go ahead and show you the basil. So come on down here. So first here is the standard Italian basil. You can see the bright greenness of it like you would expect from sort of a standard basil. Next you have your red basil and that's very easy to tell apart. So you can really easily see those popping up side by side within the same pack. And then you have here the Thai basil. At this stage you can see that it's quite a different size. It's got a little bit of a different leaf shape but as these get bigger you'll start to really see those. You can also taste the leaves because Thai basil tastes very different. And then here is the lemon basil. Also looks pretty similar to the Italian basil. But again as this gets bigger you can taste the leaves and you'll be able to tell more. So next I want to show you the garlic chives versus the sort of standard chives. And these here is the pack right here. And what I want to show you is that within this pack you can see there's seeds that are a lot bigger than others. These big seeds are the garlic chives seeds. The small seeds are the sort of regular chives. So you can actually separate those out and plant these separate. Which I would recommend because they do grow differently and they like to have their own patches. But you don't have to. Again you don't have to know or do any of this. But doing that is going to give you patches of two beautifully different plants. And these are perennials so these last a while so it's nice to separate those out if you can. The garlic chives have a bigger round stem at this point. And the other chives are thinner. So you can see that by touch and by sight. Okay next I want to move on to the kale. And you can see the difference between these. Here you have your Toscano or Dinosaur kale or Lassenado kale. Those are three different names for this. You can see it's a smooth green leaf. No hair. And then you move over to the red Russian and the white Russian. These both have hair on the leaves. The white Russian is more of a whitish pinkish stem. And the red Russian has a more closer to red like purplish pink stem. And so you can tell these ones apart. This is two and a half weeks old so you can start to tell them apart if you'd like to. So next we have mustard here. And within the mustard pack there's three different greens. It's so beautiful to have these variations within your garden. So first here actually this is not a mustard but I mixed it in because it grows similarly. This is actually a choy sum which is an Asian green. Kind of like a bok choy or a tatsoi. You can see these smooth green leaves like a bok choy. Moving on you have the mustard. And this is the red mustard first. And you can see these frilly red leaves. The red tinges on the leaves. That's the red versus the green which is similar but just green. So pretty easy to tell apart the three different seedlings within the mustard. Moving on next is the herb mix. Within the herb mix you have chamomile, lemon balm and oregano. Chamomile is very easy to tell apart from the others. Very different from the other two. Now the lemon balm and the oregano. Those are harder to tell apart from each other especially when they're really young. But as they start to get older, moving on, this is the oldest herb mix that I have going. You can see the difference between the chamomile and then that's a lemon balm. And the oregano I'm not seeing separately in here. I think that might be it there on the small bottom. It's the slowest growing but very clear definition between the chamomile and the lemon balm for sure. And lastly I may as well just show you these two different flower mixes. This one is about four weeks old. This one's about three weeks old that I'm holding here. And then this one is more about four or so weeks old. And so you can see this one's larger than the other. Just another opportunity for you to get to familiar as you're seeing them. Get to know them a little bit better. Now the last little thing that I want to show you before we head out to see the demonstration gardens is some seeds that I planted a little more than four weeks ago. And so here on the right is arugula. You can see that popping up really starting to look like arugula there. Very clearly looking like arugula. And then here is the mustard. And you can clearly see the green mustard, the green wave mustard versus the choy sum. I'm not seeing any red mustard in here. Somehow those didn't pop up within here. And might as well show you. Here's a little tomato, a little volunteer tomato that popped up. If you're using live compost you're going to get different seeds popping up in here. So come on back down. You'll see here's another tomato that's popped up. If you get plants like this you can totally transplant them here. This is some sort of cucumber or squash most likely that has popped up as a volunteer in the compost that I'm using. So I'm really excited to have shown you all of that. I hope that seeing all those examples is really helpful to you and not overwhelming. There's a lot here. Again you don't have to know all of it. I went into some detail because I really wanted you to just see these different examples all again from inside the seed pack so you can just really get to know these seeds. And definitely feel free to go back through this video and pause on the different sections. Now I want to show you the gardens which I want to say I'm more excited about but equally excited about to see them in the garden in their very young stage. So let's head to the first demonstration garden which is about three feet from where I am right now. Welcome to the demonstration garden. So here everything that I planted is two weeks ago. So I planted everything from seed, seed directly into the garden two weeks ago. And now I want to give you have you have the opportunity here to see all the different seeds sown directly into the garden. So first come on over and I'm going to show you radish. So come on down. So here is radish and you can see very similar to what we had over there. You got your first two leaves have come out a few days maybe close to a week ago already. So beautiful radishes. These are going to be one of the larger of all of them. They're the quickest growing. So now we can come on over to turnip. Here we have the turnips. So you have the leaves that the true leaves have come out the first leaves here. These are the true leaves. So there you have radish or sorry turnip. I often do that and then coming on over. We'll see the carrot next. So we have carrot here and this is a great example. You can see these more pointed leaves and then this one's just starting to have the true leaves coming out in here that are quite small. There you have carrot. So you can see here that is not a carrot. That is a tomato that's a volunteer from the compost. I'm going to pull that out because that would take over half of this garden and there is plenty of tomatoes. Now you have arugula. Arugula is another fast growing one and you can see the row here of arugula coming up and moving on. We have mustard. So we've got here I can see this is one of the choice some. Here we have the red mustard and we have a green mustard here. So you have all three varieties of mustard that are popping up here and then moving over here. This is the flour mix. So you can see quite a few different things popping up in here. Now this one's a little bit trickier of one because you won't be able to tell weeds in the other one you can easily tell but I can tell you this is a tomato. So I'm going to take that out. This is a tomato and you can tell a tomato because it smells like tomato. So you can crush a leaf and you can really tell that's a tomato. It's got this fuzzy fuzziness as well. Yes tomato and here is another tomato. So I went and pulled those out. This here not a tomato. No fuzziness. So that is the flour mix here. This is a one by one little patch of flour mix. So here we have the dill and you can see this row of dill popping up and similar to what you were seeing before. The first leaves coming out and then the first true leaves are this dill leaf. You can see some other seedlings that have popped up in here and those are going to get pulled out most likely. Those are from the compost. So continuing on over here. Yes now this is the basil very small at this point but I see some purple basils here and some green ones. So you've got the variety of different ones coming up. And then here now we have kale. So we have a row. There's about eight or so kale here and I can see this is a lassenado or dinosaur it looks like. And then this is one of the red Russian or white Russians. It's got the more like indented leaves and the fur on it. And then coming over here this is you clearly you've got your onions. So we've got a row of onions here. And then last if you just swing over a little bit this is the this is the chives and the chives in this this time aren't really popping up much. You can see a couple chives popping up here but you also see some you know non chive things that will get weeded out. I'm guessing they'll pop up but the chives really haven't popped up here yet. So this is the second garden that I want to show you and these are from transplant. So I planted these into trays and pots or actually just trays and they grew for about four weeks. Then I transplanted them and now these have been here for around a week week and a half. And so you're going to get to see them a little bit bigger. So come on over first I'm going to show you the flour mix and here is some of the flour mix here. There's three little patches from the little pots. Actually I can see here's a cilantro that popped up because a cilantro is part of the flour mix. Now I planted these two close together. You can see this and I'll talk about that a little bit at the very end of the video. Coming over here is chives. So you can see these aren't much bigger than the other ones. This one's starting to have its fourth leaf though coming up. So there's chives and then just behind here are the onions. So very similar looking to chives again and these are starting to have more leaves. They're coming along. Alright if you want to continue on right here there's some radishes there for you. Much bigger. These are again one of the fastest growing. And then if you come to the back here those here are the dill. So you can see the dills popping up. They're nice dilly type leaves. And this one already has, ooh that one's got six, seven leaves on it. So that's starting to get more mature. Alright if you want to come back out. So while we're here actually my friend Albert planted some of the seeds before I came down. And so we've got some mature mustards here that you can see. This is the green mustard and then we have the red mustard here. So you can see the frilly green and the red mustard from the mix. And I'm not seeing any of the choy sum in here. But there's two of the mustards and then of course here we've got carrots. And I cannot help but nope I'm going to save pulling that up till a little bit later. Alright so here we have basil. This is a very exciting little section of basil here. You can see we only have one red one. Not a whole lot of red ones came up in here. And then you can see the real basil leaf coming out here. That's just a you know typical Italian basil leaf. So you can see those starting to come up. And then but see the difference between this and coming over here. See how this leaf actually why don't you even come down and look a little closer. See how this leaf has got some purple forming on it. And it's got these serrated leaves quite a fair bit different. So that is your Thai basil right there. So I can see three different basils. I'll give you a moment. What do you think these are over here? What do you think this is? This is oh I can smell it from here. This is arugula. There's two different arugulas in here. And this is older mature arugula that from the pack that had been planted before. Okay now we're coming over here to the mustard section. So here you can see a choy sum that's getting quite a bit bigger. You can see these nice whole leaves. And then here you can see the green mustard. The frilliness to it. And then here is a red mustard. So you can see the three different mustards in here. And back here is the what you just saw. This is the arugula one of my favorites. So you can see looks like there's two different varieties of arugula in here. It will vary from year to year. But you've got what looks to be two different varieties. One with a more indented leaf and lobed leaf. And one that's a little more whole. A couple more plants to show you. Here we've got some kale's. So we have some of the russian kale's in here. I'm not seeing any of the lasanado. Didn't end up in this little patch. But there's your kale about five weeks old. And then the last little section I see we have a surprise. That is one of my biggest challenges. And the squirrels have been in here digging. And they've really done a number on my chamomile here. I'm going to go ahead and just rebury these. They are still going to be alive. But it's a struggle that I have here. The squirrels just come in digging around. And it's juggling. So here a little further back we have our carrots. And now you can see a real nice example of young carrots. And the very clear carroty leaves. And then here we have our turnips. So there we have turnips. Okay so there's just a few things that I would like you to keep in mind. And that is this lesson was really just to show you the young plants. The little babies, the seedlings. Not to look at that and say that's how yours should look at the same amount of time. We all have our own growing conditions. And so I really just want to hit that home that you're just really learning the plants here. This was not like here's how to plant. Or what to transplant and what to put directly in the ground. So don't like learn from that. There's other classes that are exactly for those things. A couple of things I want to say about that. I'm in Florida. It's the winter here which is our prime growing season for annuals. This is kind of like growing in the late spring or the early summer in the northern climate. So if you're growing in the very early spring you're going to have plants generally growing a lot slower than this. The other big thing is just because I have it in a pot doesn't mean that you'll put it into a pot. A lot of them like your radishes and your turnips and your carrots. Those are generally going to be directly transplanted or directly planted. Direct sown into the ground. I planted everything into pots just to be able to show it to you. So you're going to watch the video about direct seeding versus transplanting to get that information. Not from the pots that I showed you today. Also I transplanted some into my garden not at the most ideal time. So again just because I transplanted it after a certain number of weeks isn't the ideal. And the guide teaches you the exact ideals as well as the video section on that. So on that note I'm so glad to have been able to introduce you to the plants a little bit more through this little lesson on seedlings and young plants. And I hope that by watching this and by connecting with this you know the plants a little more. You feel a little more comfortable in the garden and it'll help you on this journey to growing your own food to connecting to your food to breaking free from the global industrial food system and connecting more deeply with your community and yourself. See you in the next class.