 So if you have started a bunch of your plants from seed at home, congratulations. That is a great way to get a whole bunch of plants going for a little bit of a cost. But once they start to get overgrown in these little seedling trays, it's time to thin them out and spread them out so that you get the best growth on these seedlings before they go outside. So in this video, I'm going to show you how to thin out your seedlings to maximize the yield and create some beautiful, strong, healthy plants to go out into your garden. So to start off, I want to get some potting mix ready to set up some larger containers here that we're going to transfer our seedlings to. I got some potting mix here from Miracle Grow. And I'm going to add a little pair of light to it just to kind of lighten it up a little bit, to keep it nice and loose, help retain that moisture. And then I'm just going to work it in together. And then you should either add a bunch of water to the soil here right now, just to get it good moist, or we can water the containers once we get filled up, which is what I'm going to do. Sometimes these potting mixes have some big chunks in there, so you kind of want to work through them, make sure you're not putting any big sticks into your little containers. You could run it through a sifter if you wanted to as well, but I think we've got some nice soil here ready to pot up our containers. So as you can see here, I've got a whole variety of repurposed containers. I always try to save anything that I get from a greenhouse that's reusable. These are like a four inch pot, which are great for up potting too. These here I think are a three inch, and then of course these six cells or four cell ones. If you can repurpose them for a couple years, it's always fine some way to use them. So we're just going to fill up each of these with some potting soil. Try to push it down. As you can see, there's some big chunks of wood in there. I try to pull them out whenever I can. Just kind of make sure that you're pressing your soil and get rid of any air pockets. I really need to get myself a potting tray of some kind, but something like this dollar store turkey container here, roasting pan, works great for holding your plants in your pots. I use them a lot for when I'm watering, I can bottom water my containers. That way these work good for that. So while this is just soaking up the water, well let's check out our seedlings and see how many we can save and repot up here or what we might have to just thin out and toss into the compost. Okay, so if you'll see here, I have a lot of my petunias over here on this side. I had some black and then I had a couple rows of the white. And as you can see, I still have a lot of cells where nothing popped up. So some of these cells had multiple seedlings and I've been just plucking and sticking them in empty cells where nothing was coming up. Over here I've got pansies coming. They were a lot slower to pop up, but they are starting to come now and they don't seem to be too overcrowded. So I'm just going to leave them for now. And over here the coalesces really took off early. And as you can see, I have a bunch in this one cell that I need to thin out so that they can really take off and grow. You can see I just have one growing in here so that makes a big difference. They really can take off and these are getting to the point now where I should probably pop them right out and you know, pot them up in something like this today. It's really interesting to see how slow some things can be. As you can see, I planted all these black colored petunias at the same time and I have one here and just in the last week more are starting to come up. You can see there's all sorts of them coming up here. These are the ones that I saved seeds from the garden last year or from my plants last year and just sprinkled them in here. They were pretty slow to germinate but they are coming now. So I'm just going to leave this area and let them grow as big as I can before I try to pluck them out. As you can see here I got some really nice black petunias coming that I'm pretty happy about and lots of white. So it's really quite easy to transplant your seedlings. You don't have to worry too much about you know whether you're going to kill them or not but I've actually had pretty good luck with with the transplanting of the coalesces and the petunias so far. So once you got your cells ready and moistened a pencil or some kind of a tool like this just to get a nice big hole ready and then I just look in a spot here where I've got too many coalesces. I'll try to leave the biggest one in place let it stay there and then just gently try to get as close to the soil as you can and pull. As you can see we got a bunch of roots there. Just put it into the hole and hold it in place and just push the soil around. So now this little guy has got a nice big cell to grow in and he will probably take off no problem. So I just keep repeating that for as many as I can try to save and and repot depending on how many you want and how much space you have in a sunny window I probably will be giving these away to other friends and family that may not have started any if I don't have room form in my window but I love to have as many flowers as I can going in my yard. We here in our cold climate our outdoor season is so short and you know just having beautiful flowers growing on your patio in your garden try to get as much going as I can and as much color in my yard as I can for that short season. I'm going to try grabbing a whole bundle of these sometimes they get a little bit intertwined but I'll just pull one away stick that in there this one seems all right as well so we might as well throw it in here. So this is a variety pack of coalesces that I started from seeds so they should be a different bunch of different colors different designs on the leaves they're one of my favorites to put into my pots with my flowers so now I have you know another container of four more coalesces here ready to take off. So when you're trying to pot up something bigger like this here this coalesce here is probably going to need some more space again I just try to make room in a bigger pot so when I'm pulling something out of a cell here and I want to pretty much take the whole you know thing of dirt as well with me I find one of the best tools to use is a flathead screwdriver and just kind of push it down to the side and you should be able to pop up the whole thing right here. Now I didn't have this moistened as much as I probably should have but we should be able to repot this into this three inch pot again just try to fit it into that hole pack the soil around it and there you've repotted up a nice coleus this should be really happy in this container until it's ready to go outside into my flower pots or gardens or containers wherever I have planned for it to go. These are ones that I did probably on maybe about two weeks ago pulled them out of a cell where they were as multiple they were just tiny put them in here I did double up some of them still I might have to split them again but these just took off and are doing really well. Same thing with the white petunias took tiny ones out of the cells put them into these bigger containers and these will just stay in here again till they're ready to be potted out into my outdoor garden. So as you can see here I still have two little coleus plants and when you try to move them around here you can see that they are pretty intertwined their roots so if I try to pull one out I'd probably end up killing them both so in that situation I'll just go in with some tiny scissors here these are I think my husband's mustache scissors and I'll just clip the one little one out and then leave this guy in here and he hopefully will take off now and I am to stay there until he's ready to be moved. So that's kind of how I work through these cells kind of pick the the healthy one leave it in there pluck out or cut out the smaller ones that I either want to just toss into a compost or repot so just kind of make sure that you pack the dirt back around them as you can see here I got quite a few to work through with these coleus they are pretty uh overgrown right now I'm going to just try to repot as many as I think I'm going to use or need or have space for in my windows and the rest will just get cut out and tossed into my compost pile. I don't know some people think this is maybe a little too finicky for them but I find it's kind of a enjoyable little process that I do every week or so while these are just sprouting and growing it's still early there's not much happening outside in my garden I got my tomatoes peppers started they're just sitting there under the lights growing away so this is kind of just a nice way to get some more flowers ready for the outdoor garden that you're not going to have to go and spend a lot of money for in the the greenhouses so the one thing you don't want to do is leave a whole bunch of them in one of these little tiny cells to try and fight for nutrition and fight for space if you have too many in there their roots you know they're just going to become weak and end up being spindly little seedlings that probably won't transplant very good so you want to make sure that you keep up on that thinning process throughout the next few weeks here in growing zone three Saskatchewan Canada we are in early April so we still have you know good six weeks before our last frost date so these are going to stay in the sunny window for another six weeks but these that we planted up today in another week or so will look like this and then hopefully by mid-May they'll be going into my flower pots and they will be a good strong seedling like you would find at the greenhouse so as you can see here now each one of these cells oops there's some more there gonna pluck these little guys out each one of these cells should have just one strong healthy colius right now just checking to make sure there's no little baby ones sprouting underneath so that these guys can really take off so I will start feeding these now with a very diluted fertilizer fish fertilizer usually is what I use in my watering can give them a little extra food now so what had started out is 18 cells of colysis that were overgrown and overcrowded and now I've spread them out into some new containers so I've pretty much doubled the amount of colysis that I had started and looks like I'm going to have a really nice variety of them excited to get them outdoors this summer so I hope that you enjoyed watching me as I am potting up some of my flower seedlings here please hit that like button it really helps my channel leave a comment and don't forget to subscribe so that you don't miss out on future videos coming to the channel thanks for watching