16 Plant HAUL: Unboxing & Transplanting Houseplants, Herbs, Ferns, and Flowers

Before we get started, I'm a little sick today guys, so hopefully you can forgive the voice, but we've got a pretty crazy unboxing. This is one of four different boxes. As you can see, it says live plants. You know what we're unboxing, baby. We're unboxing some houseplants and some flowers because I'm trying to up my houseplant game indoors, even though it's spring. And whenever it's spring, I always neglect my poor houseplants and I go out into the edible garden and do a bunch of stuff out there. But we're going to up our houseplant game. We're going to up our herb game and our flower game. And the flowers, especially for me, it's a new territory, but it's super important because of all the pollination that I want to be bringing into my garden. Those beneficial insects, those beneficial pollinators, the solitary bees, everything that's going to help rebuild that ecosystem that's more or less lost in urban environments. So that's what I'm trying to do. These all came from plants by post. So it's not a sponsored video. However, they did send these out to me. So I just wanted to be upfront about that. But we're going to go ahead and dive in and take a look at the 16 different epic plants that I've got for you today. So the first thing to do is figure out how to get these guys out of here. And we'll talk even about how they're packed up. So our first batch, I'm so afraid. There we go. Ooh, excuse me. Okay. So we have our flowers here. Which ones are these? Sun Patients, pretty interesting. Let's go ahead and pop these open. We're going to see, at least for this first batch, we're going to see exactly how they're packed up. But also in this video, we're going to figure out where these are all going in the home or outdoors, because that's one of the things you order plants online. You're like, okay, well, I got them. Now, how do I make sure the instant I get them, I don't immediately kill them? Which I think many of us, myself included, have done. So what we're going to do is troubleshoot and really figure out how to solve that problem. But I'm just going to make sure. Okay, you just do that. You do this. And from there, you just slide these out. Look at that. You've got an entire pot. Very, very gently packed. And of course, yeah, there are some flower drop. There's some leaf drop. This thing's got shipped from quite a while away, but it seems like they're in pretty good shape. So let's go ahead and unpack these. These are the Sun Patients. And we'll move on to the next one. Alrighty, it's time for number two of box number one. Toss that. Goodbye. We've got rosemary right here. Really nice, healthy looking rosemary. Rosemary, for me, is a plant that, honestly, we use in our landscaping here in San Diego. So can always use more of this. I just can't get enough of that smell. It's always so amazing. So I've got plenty of ways I'm going to use the rosemary. And honestly, you let rosemary flower. Beautiful, tiny little blue flowers come out and it's amazing for pollinators. Really, any herb that you grow that you just let go to flower, eventually, if you cut it back for too long, it's going to try to do it anyway. So you let it go and pollinators will really just love you. Next one on this side of the equation is euphorbia, which is really, really cool. Kind of looks a little rosemary-ish, but is not. And doesn't quite have the same smell. Doesn't quite have the same smell, but still an amazing plant. All right, this is going to be one of the best smelling boxes for sure, especially this first one I pull out. Here we go. Boom. We've got lavender, baby. So two different varieties here. Lavender, one of those you like it or you hate it type of smells it seems like. I know for me, I absolutely love it. There's a plant right about a block that way. Every time I walk by it, I basically just do this smell and it's just amazing. My brother hates it, so I always try to troll him and I try to throw lavender out whenever I see him from my garden. But that's another story. So we've got two different varieties of lavender here. There's a really beautiful one. I'm really a big fan of the ones that have the flowers, the leaves or the petals coming off right at the top. This one, also amazing. This is a more classic variety. So both of these are going to be really, really good for the pollinators in my garden because they just throw out flowers like crazy. And especially on these ones, you'll get bees coming in on all of these little sections here. All right, number two of this box. I feel like I'm pulling the sword from the stone every time I do this. So we've got geraniums. We have some pink right here and then we have some red right here. Really great quality, as far as I can tell, of these plants. Geraniums, obviously a really popular plant for pest control, good companion plant. So these might actually make it into my actual garden beds on the sides, perhaps as a bit of a barrier plant. Or I could just go ahead and put them in flower boxes, but it's going to be my first time having some really beautiful looking geraniums in the garden. All right, if you're a houseplant lover, you're going to like this next box. It's full of houseplants. We've got peperomia first. Ooh, okay. We're mixing it up. We're doing a little bit of a combo. So we've got asparagus fern, I'm pretty sure. Here's what this guy is right here. My friend Summer over at Homestead Brooklyn has been doing a lot with this plant. So an incredible houseplant that of course could be grown outside. I think a lot of houseplant people forget that all plants started out outside. So the care guides for indoor plants sometimes are a little funny to read because if you think about it, you realize all of these plants can handle usually a little bit more tough love than you might imagine. But really cool looking fern right here. And we've got a peperomia that I've actually never grown before. So I'm really excited about this one as well. These are probably going to make it right here or potentially over here, which you guys haven't really seen yet, but stay tuned. Let's go ahead and unveil. Oh baby, we got that Boston fern. I can't tell you how many people send me messages on their Boston ferns because for some reason, beautiful, amazing, popular fern that everyone murders. Everyone kills this thing. It gets crispy and dry and they just are very sad because it's a beautiful fern. It dies. So maybe we'll do a specific care guide on the Boston fern in a future video. And then we have another peperomia that's a bit variegated here, which has really beautiful looking leaves and pretty sizable. I'm actually really impressed with the overall size of all of these plants. These are in six to, I think there's a six inch pot. So really impressed with the size of these plants. Okay, it's our final box. The first two coming out are the bacopa. Two different varieties here. We have one with white flowers and we have one with blue flowers or I guess, I don't know. I'm kind of colorblind. I think they're like a pinkish, purplish, maybe a little bluish. Let me know in the comments because legitimately I've purchased shirts that are pink before without knowing it. I've purchased shirts that are brown and thought they were green. So colors, not my strong suit. Anyways, we've got two more to unbox and these are cool. So we've got one yellow dahlia and we have one osteospermum. So the dahlia is a plant that has really blown up, at least if you follow me over on Instagram, at Epic Gardening. All of my UK friends have really grown tons and tons of dahlias and I think they're getting their dahlias ready this year again. So a plant I've never grown myself personally. Now I will grow it, certainly not from seed. Now we've got this guy right here which honestly, this probably takes the cake for me as far as my favorite looking flower that I've gotten out of this box from Plants By Post. Really pleased with the way that that flower looks. I like any flower that's multicolor. So for me, this is good. And also just the sheer amount of flowers that are coming out are gonna be again, really good for the pollinators that I'm trying to cultivate in the garden. So now that we have them all unboxed, it's time to figure out what the heck am I gonna do with 16 different plants in my small urban space. So come along with me as I figure that out and thanks again to Plants By Post for sending these out and sorry that you've had to put up with this raspy weirdo voice that I've got. Just maybe a little overworked, maybe a little plant crazy, I don't know, but I came down with a little cold. So sorry about that. Maybe it makes it like a little soothing, sensual plant experience. Anyways, I've got a mess of flowers and houseplants to figure out what to do with so come along with me for that part of the journey. So I've got our little garden trowel, we're going back in, we're gonna spot fill all the areas and bury around. Just pretty basic potting up techniques here. Nothing too crazy. Oop, don't make mistakes like that. We just wanna make sure that we've covered all the roots. You don't wanna have the roots be exposed so you definitely wanna make sure that the surface is below. So we'll just keep on going. Okay, so not the most clean potting job I've ever done but it's filled up. All of the actual, the plants from the pots, the soil line is right below. So there's no exposed roots, nothing like that. Just gonna come in and give it a nice deep drink because we didn't hydrate any of the soil before. And when you water in, I find it's really helpful to do it really gently at the start cause sometimes the soil needs a little bit of time to soak and then what you can do is come back in and water again. So I kind of call it like water, wait, water. And that just helps a lot for, oops, any soil that's perhaps really high in peat and needs to rehydrate. We might've overfilled that section right there but that's okay. Just water it in and it'll sink just a little bit. So like anything that's really high in peat, really it helps to do that. So there we go. We're just gonna water it in. And what's nice about this is it's potted up. If I find that this particular spot isn't the best for them, south is actually this direction right here. Sun's gonna kind of come in like this throughout the day. It's not a big deal. I just pick this thing up, move it to the next place. As long as there's a two by four or two by six somewhere in the house, I can put it right on that or I can just put it right on the ground. So this one's done. We're gonna go ahead and fast forward through potting up the other ones. So stay tuned. Box number two is in with both geraniums, our dahlia and our lavender, the more classic variety of lavender. So we only have a few more left. And when I say a few, I think I mean six. We have our Spanish lavender, osteosperma, euphorbia. We have the Boston fern, which actually has been doing quite well just hanging out outside, as well as the rosemary and the asparagus fern. So let's figure out what to do with these. So we have both our normal pepperomia and our variegated one doing really well up here. I potted them up. One thing I like to do when I pot up, if you can see, is I leave a little bit of a lip, you know, maybe like a centimeter or so because you don't want the water to overflow. And then I also like to kind of tap the side and just tap it in because you've got your, you know, your little pot that it was in from the nursery and then you have to backfill. So I put maybe this much soil in, put my little pot in and then I'll put soil around it and I'll tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. That'll fill in all the gaps. Then I'll add a little bit more, then I'll tap, then I'll water in. And so these are the two houseplants we got from our plants by post. We're going to go ahead and tackle the Boston fern, the asparagus fern and the rest of the flowers right now. We interrupt today's vlog to show you something you guys have probably all been waiting to see if you follow me for my houseplant stuff. It's the multi-propped pothos plant from my other video. Now you might be wondering, okay, this is not, these aren't the pothos varieties that you actually potted up. And that's because what happened is I actually killed it by leaving it on my windowsill here with the window open and it dried it out before they had really set root. So what I decided to do was go all the way back to the drawing board. I grabbed a couple of varieties I didn't have before. So this is a neon, this is the classic, which weirdly enough I didn't have, which is golden pothos, devil's ivy. And then I have my scandapsus pictus right here. So propped them all, put them all in the same pot, did it right this time and check it out. It's pretty cool. So this is, this will eventually start to trail. I really kind of crammed a ton in here. So I'll eventually have to pot this up even further, but there's no reason why you can't combine different houseplants in the same pot, same species or different species if they have the same soil and water and light requirements. So check this out. Pretty cool. Sorry if you were bummed and wanted to see the original. I was too, but it just didn't work out. So that's what I've got for you guys on that. So the Boston fern, which most of us probably grow indoors as a houseplant, I'm going to try throwing into this shadier spot in my backyard. I don't think many of you have actually seen this little backyard patch before. As you can see, there's some slatted light coming through. So it's filtered sunlight, nice mild temperatures, doesn't get extremely hot. It's not going to fry these, these sensitive leaves. So we're going to go ahead and try that. I've definitely amended this soil up pretty significantly with some worm castings, with some coconut coir, stuff that's just going to help improve my native topsoil, which is not terrible, but it's not amazing by any stretch of the imagination. So just trying to get that soil a little bit better for our little Boston fern here. I know a lot of people have trouble with Boston ferns. I think I have an article on my blog about how to stop killing your Boston fern. And you know, ferns in general, probably one of the most challenging houseplants for many of us to deal with, myself included. But you know, proper care, just make sure you give it what it needs. It's just a plant that grows quite differently than many other plants, right? So that's pretty much why most people kill it, is they don't respect the fact that it is a different type of plant. You know, it's not as hardy as let's say a snake plant or any of these other more no-kill houseplants. So the Boston fern's in the ground here. We're going to water it in in a second and we'll crack on to the other plants. All right, so now to figure out what to do with this rosemary. My herb bed's actually right over here. This is currently a potato bed. This particular seed potato is one of the 11 that I planted here that didn't come up. So there's an empty spot here. These are going to be in the ground for at least another 45 to 55 days. I've got some time to throw this rosemary in here, let it get established. And you know, rosemary is a good border plant for an edible garden. You can do a lot with it. It's really not one that has any trouble with pests. And in fact, I've noticed it does, it's a bit of a pest repellent. So that's a really good scenario for me in my edible garden. So I'm just going to dig this corner out right here. These are my birdies raised beds, which are actually now available for sale on my store if you're interested in them, really cool. But rosemary, I mean, it's one of the easier plants to grow in my opinion. This one's pretty root bound, but that's okay. We're going to break it up a little bit. We're going to give it a nice deep water. And I like to kind of like roll the roots around like that. If it's really bad, like this one is, that's pretty much my technique. I'm going to be pretty aggressive here, loosening this part up. Because the last thing you want to do is throw it in the ground and then just have all the roots just sit there right next to each other and like pool up water. It's just not a good scenario. So we're going to loosen this up a little bit. Once rosemary gets established, it is established. So you don't need to worry too much as long as you can get it to that point where it's nice and healthy and established in the bed. So we're going to do that. Let's put this in right here. Backfill. Rosemary can be a little rough with, so you can kind of do this and make sure you're perfectly filling it up. Now we have a nice corner rosemary in this bed that is full of potatoes. So we're in a good spot here. Okay, so lavender now. This is a really cool variety by the way. Just looks a little different, looks a little funky. This soil in this bed is not my best soil of all time. It's a little bit too well draining for most of these plants, which is why you can see them start to yellow a little bit. And I'm going to need to just switch up in general what I'm planting here. Weirdly enough though, lavender does like relatively well draining soil. Doesn't really want to have wet feet as they call it. And also likes slightly alkaline soil, a little bit higher on that pH scale. So like above a 6.5, below a 7.3 ish. So this coincidentally is actually an oddly good bed to add my lavender. So I'm going to dig it in right here. Lavender, a wonderful pollinator plant. Actually just found a grub in here. So these are really gross. Look at that. Absolutely disgusting. I absolutely hate these things to the core of my being. So that's going to go somewhere over there. We're going to go ahead and dig this guy in. Let's take a look at the roots of this. Looking good. Lavender's much more fine roots than rosemary. Rosemary is much more thick. These are just very fine and loose. We're going to break it up a little bit. We don't want this matting to be going on. Break it up, dig it in, water it in. That's how the game goes guys. It's pretty simple, but it is fun. It's fun to kind of try to, especially me growing in an urban space, trying to cram stuff in as much as I can. Sometimes it doesn't really work out that well and I have my failures, you know, but when it works, it really works. And you can get this like densely packed, beautiful looking garden in what most people would say like, oh, I can't even grow anything in that space. Only 10 feet by 10 feet or only 20 feet by 15 feet or whatever. You can grow way more than you could possibly imagine. I mean, I'm about to grow probably over a hundred pounds of potatoes in a couple of beds. So let's go ahead and water this in. You can see that water just falling straight through this soil. I'm going to need to amend this with maybe a little bit of peat moss or coconut corn once I clear this bed out, but for now the lavender is going to be in a good spot. We're actually coming back to, let's call it fern gully over here with the asparagus fern, which is definitely a plant that can be grown outdoors. Again, fortunately I do live in a climate where most of these plants that a lot of people consider indoor only, I can grow them outdoors. So I'm very thankful for that. But you know, I think a lot of people in houseplants forget that all plants began their life outdoors. So, you know, all these very intricate care guides for, you know, all these houseplants that we know and love, a lot of them are just a slightly bit more hardy than you might imagine because, you know, I've read some crazy things like, Oh, you can't even blow any wind on this planet or it'll die. It's like, not really. Check out these roots. Really, really interesting roots on this one. And I'm not going to break this up too much. Look at that. Look at that right there. Really interesting. Okay. Well, this one's probably going to be just fine in here. So asparagus fern definitely likes indirect dappled light, which is exactly what we're working with right here. And indoors, similar. Not right next to the window, so maybe slightly a little bit further away. But honestly, I've also seen people grow them successfully outdoors in relatively full sun. But boom, there we got theirs. The asparagus is in. Okay, so I'm back here with the final two plants. We have our euphorbia and our osteospermum. I'm going to put them both along this corner right here, this edge. This is kind of, it's not my throwaway bed, but it's just the bed that I plant sort of experimental, random, whatever crops. So I've got nasturtium here. I've got Job's tears here. I've got some random pink celery that I'm just testing out. I actually have a really cool Chinese amaranth over there that I'll do in a future video, but we're doing this. We're just putting it in. This soil, again, is probably not my best quality soil. But again, it's one of those just amend over time type of things. So dig down. Gets a little heavier in clay as we go down. But I've been doing some amending here, so it's been pretty good. This likes full sun. So this is actually not full sun right here, but it's full enough that I think it'll be just fine. I'll break those roots up just slightly. A little bit more depth. And we've got this on drip, so it'll be just fine. Get the water that it needs, but I will give it a nice little water in. So that's starting to fill that in right there. And we're going to go ahead and put the osteo right here. Actually don't know exactly how well it'll do in this particular spot, but that's what we're gardening for, guys. You don't know everything about every single plant all the time, especially me with flowers. I don't know as much about flowers as I do edibles, certainly, and herbs and microgreens and stuff. So we'll see how this one goes. Should be fine. Look at that. That's pretty root bound. We'll break it up. Oh, it's not that bad. Just looks root bound, but it's very easily broken up. Very healthy looking roots as well. And that's going down right there. Fill it in. Make sure, you always want to make sure you get all the gaps in because you don't want any random air pockets that are in there. So that's looking pretty sexy, if I do say so myself. There we go. That is, I mean, that's just a beautiful flower. I gotta be honest with you guys, that's just a gorgeous flower. Okay. Well, there we have it guys. We unboxed 16 plants and we put them in all different areas of the house. We have the peperomias in here. We have some ferns in the backyard. We have some planter boxes with flowers and then we also have mixed in some herbs and some ornamentals in my actual front yard garden, both for just squeezing in some extra yield and also for throwing in a little extra color. So thank you so much to Plants By Post for sending those out. And I do want to say one thing before we go. Look at this. The book, this is the only copy in existence right now. They're coming really soon, but I just wanted to give you a little sneak peek. Really happy, really excited to have it. I put a bunch of my favorite Epic Gardeners in the book from Instagram. So you've got some of my friends that are showing their gardens off, but the rest of the book is just how do you grow plants in an effective way? It's, it's how to grow, basically what do plants need to grow? Then we've got all sorts of different methods like indoor edibles, for example. And especially if you're watching this video as more of a houseplant girl or guy, this book is not dedicated to houseplants really at all. It's more trying to say, hey, you're in an urban environment, you default towards houseplants. Maybe you should try edibles, you know? Maybe you should try some herbs or some patio-sized tomatoes, some Space Master cucumbers, all sorts of stuff like that. So the goal is basically get a basic knowledge of how plants grow, get a basic knowledge of six different methods that you can use to grow, and then maybe 10 to 30 different problems you might run into, pests, diseases, and mistakes. So it's a very beginner's primer guide on some urban gardening techniques that I think you guys will really like. So I'm sending out free packs of seeds if you go ahead and pre-order epicgardening.com forward slash book. If you want signed copies, you can actually go to my shop, which is shop.epicgardening.com. Links will be in the description. But anyways, thanks so much for watching. Let me know if you liked this video and you want to see more content like this, a more free form, or you really like the how-to stuff that I do. Let that down in the comments too. All right. Good luck in the garden. Keep on growing.