 Hi there and welcome to Little Garden on the prairies. So it is still at least a month, if not more, before I can start moving my plants outdoors. It is still very cold here on the Saskatchewan prairies. Sadly we're having one of those springs where it's very cold and wet, which is really not a bad thing as far as farming goes. We do want the moisture, I'd hate to complain, but lots of times at this time of year I'm already outside getting my pots ready and digging in the dirt and it just hasn't happened yet this year. We cannot control the weather and every year we have different types of springs. This is just one of those years where it's a little cool. But there's still lots of stuff to do indoors as far as all my indoor starts and in today's video we're going to be doing some pruning. No pruning, some thinning and some up planting of some of my different plants indoors here. So let's get started. So these are my five mystery pepper plants that I started indoors from seed. Each of them are a different variety. I think I had done all sweet and just medium heat. As you can see, I mentioned a few other videos, I have forgotten to mark these when I planted them and they went under the grow lights and I have no idea which each one of these specifically is, but they all are looking beautiful. So they will just keep growing, I'll put them out in the garden this summer and we will see what kind of peppers we get from each of these. So one of the reasons that you top off your indoor seedlings sometimes is to create a much fuller bushier plant and then hopefully get more fruit from it. So naturally with the peppers that is something that they recommend you do most of the time and I always have done that. I top them off and they shoot out a lot more branches and blooms and it does really work. They do get fuller and thicker and produce more blooms. But I just watched a video called Do Not Prune Your Peppers and it was put out by Jeff from the Ripe Tomato Farms. He has a gardening channel, he's on the west coast of Canada and he has so many great videos, I highly recommend watching him. But he did an experiment with peppers to see if, you know, topping them off and making them fuller with more blooms turns out to be better as far as the harvest compared to just leaving them and letting them grow as is. So in his experiment he's growing in a shorter growing season than, you know, some of the people in warmer growing zones south of us. I myself have a very short growing season of only approximately 110 days. So what he discovered is that in that shorter time frame, you top these off, it does actually, you know, send out more shoots and more blooms and makes a fuller plant. But it does delay the time to harvest and the size of the fruit that you get. So I'm convinced that just leaving these as is, letting them grow and bloom and produce fruit in the short time frame that we have here on the Saskatchewan Prairies is the best route to go. So I'm not going to be doing anything to the peppers this year and we'll see how that turns out. Something that I will for sure be doing some topping off and thinning is to my petunia flowers and my snap dragons. They are starting to try and shoot out little blooms and flowers and snap dragons are getting fairly tall and gangly. And being I still have another month to keep these indoors, I think cutting them down will help kind of slow their growth, develop more stronger roots and just keep them going until it's time to plant them outside. So for the snap dragons, I've just been going about two sets of leaves up the stem and then cutting just above that second set of leaves. I'm hoping that these will maybe bush out a little bit more and it will obviously slow them down on trying to send out any more blooms. So wherever I see a bloom starting on my petunias, I'm just snipping that off and they seem to send out longer shoots kind of from the side with their bloom sometimes. So I'm just going to be snipping them off, slowing down that growth for now. And after I've given the flowers a good pruning, I'd like to give them a feeding with this water soluble seaweed fertilizer. I just mix it up in a container cap full and give it a good drink from the bottom. So these are my coleus plants that I had taken cuttings from a couple coleuses that I had overwintered, rooted them and then transplanted them into these containers and they are looking so beautiful right now. They don't need a whole lot of pruning or thinning, but they're always the odd one that has little flowers at the top that I will pinch off whenever I see them. But for the most part, they're doing great in these containers and will be ready to go outdoors in a month or so. So as you can see here with my tomato seedlings, they are really sticking off. I have them planted in these solo cups that I only filled halfway up and the plants are starting to grow outside the containers. My ground cherry only sprouted one plant, but that's okay, I think it'll be alright. So what I'm going to do now on each of these tomato seedlings is just pinch off these small leaves at the bottom of the stem and fill these cups up with more potting soil. So with this method I'm using by burying the stems even further here with this potting soil, the little tiny hairs that are on the tomato stems will turn into roots and create a very strong root ball getting these plants ready for moving outdoors, hopefully in another month. So these are the two beefsteak tomatoes that I had planted quite early because I wanted to just demonstrate the method that I was using with my tomatoes this year where I only filled up the solo cup halfway when I started my seeds and then once the plant grew a little bit higher I removed some of the early stems and topped it up with more dirt. As you can see I have a really strong beautiful tomato plant here, I just wanted to show you the size of the stalk here and if I remove it from the cup I'm using too much dirt. You can see how that first half of growth here has produced a lot of roots and then since I added all that extra dirt you can see how the stem, all those little tiny hairs have now developed into more roots so I have a really good strong root ball here, a very strong plant ready to go into the ground. But as I said it is way too cold to put any plants outdoors this would surely never survive out there for at least another five to six weeks but you can see it's getting very root bound and it needs to get into some kind of a bigger container. So fortunately I have a grow tent here in my basement I'm going to plant these up into larger pots and put them into my grow tent. So as you can see I already got some blooming action on these plants so if I can keep these going in my grow tent I should have some beefsteak tomatoes before summer. Then in another month or so all these little tomatoes that I just added a bunch of soil to should start looking like this guy here and I will start hardening them off and by the time they're ready to go to the garden they should be a really strong tomato plant. So with my onions here that I've started with seed I've already given them one bit of a haircut about three weeks ago and they are growing back again so it doesn't hurt to give them another trim. Again I usually like to use the green tops here in my cooking so I'm just going to cut back these a little bit more today except these smell beautiful and they are really nice just to chop off into my salad or into an omelet. So by cutting down the tops a little bit it helps send them the energy down into the bulbs and the roots and get them bigger and stronger. Just smell it in the air there's a beautiful aroma of fresh green onions right now it's really nice. So I have no thinning required here for my cucumbers that I've started indoors but I just wanted to give you an update on the three types that I had planted in containers here. So this is my lemon cucumber it is coming along really nicely it's got lots of big leaves coming now so it's looking good and this is the cucumber melon I got three sprouting here now so I'm pretty excited about that and my other ones my apple cucumber seeds that I planted I've planted probably six or seven of them over the last couple weeks and not seeing any germination so the seeds must have been just no good so it doesn't look like I'll have any of the apple cucumbers. Okay so I just wanted to quickly show you how I am going to pot up these two beef steak tomatoes that are you know bursting out of these cups and they need to get into bigger pots I can't take them outside yet for another month so I'm going to set them up in these grow bags here and put them into my greenhouse. So these grow bags were used outdoors last summer to plant things in and so they had soil in them I've had them warming up in the garage for the last couple days. Now I normally don't like bringing in pots that have been outdoors growing outdoors into my home because that could bring pests and bugs into your house which is always a pain but I kind of didn't have any choice I thought these would work really good they're perfect size for these bush beef steaks so I'm going to take my chances hopefully being outside in the freezing cold all winter has killed off any any bugs or eggs that were in the soil. I also have these tomato cages in my house because I've been using them all winter for my indoor growing so I've set these up into the bag so that these tomatoes already have a nice sturdy trellising system okay so there is the first tomato plant all set up in its container ready to go into the grow tent and hopefully produce some tomatoes before the summer for me. So I hope you enjoyed watching this video and learned a few tips and tricks on how pinching and thinning your indoor seedlings helps make a fuller plant and a stronger plant ready for your outdoor garden please hit that like button leave a comment and don't forget to subscribe thanks for watching