HUGE Seedling Update - Potting Up Dahias And Tomatillos! 🌱 || Seedling Care

Everybody, it's Lori with Main Street Gardener, and I'm a zone 7B garden. And today I am just spending some time processing and working with all of my seedlings. So these lettuce seedlings, they look a little lime green here, but they are really pretty shade of green. This is a mix of some lettuce heads, some romaine, and I just wanted to go ahead and get them out in my new raised bed and hope that they will grow a little bit faster there. Now, the next thing I'm working on today, these are snapdragon seeds, and I have several trays of them. Now, it's a good idea once your snapdragons have at least two sets of leaves, so double leaves. So you'll have two at the bottom, and then there's a second set. Once they grow past that, you want to start trimming them back. That's when you know that you need to do that. It will prevent, you can see here where I'm cutting back, that's that third set of new leaves. It prevents this leggy, weak-stemmed plant. So especially with snapdragons, you want your snapdragons to grow really tall and strong and to have lots of blooms. So I learned this the hard way. The first few years that I grew snapdragons, I did not pinch them back, but you can see here how they're bending over. And so you do want to take the time to go in and pinch them. So just make sure you've got two sets of leaves, and then you can cut them back. I know it seems so harsh, but you will be glad you did it. So that was project number two today. And then project number three is actually going to be working on all of my dahlias. So I wanted to show you how I'm going to work with my dahlia tubers that I've been kind of pre-starting. I'm also going to work on my dahlia seedlings. So I thought it would bring up my seedlings as well as my dahlia tubers that I've started and work out here in the sunshine today. And I thought it might help you to see the difference in seedlings versus tubers and the success that I've had. So right here, you'll see I have three trays of dahlia seedlings at different stages, as well as some tubers that I pre-sprouted. So I like to take a large tray, just fill it with some soil. You can use seed starting mix or potting soil. It really doesn't matter. And then I just set the tubers in the soil and put them in a warm spot. So for me, I actually put these under some grow lights and they have now started developing their green foliage. So as soon as you see some sprouts like this one, you know you have a viable tuber. Now this is a tuber that I could probably even cut apart, but I didn't see any other eyes. So I'm just gonna keep the one, I'm gonna keep the entire tuber intact. So because I'm in a zone 7B, I have found that my best results for my dahlias and to get blooms from really mid-June through September is I like to, once they've pre-sprouted, I put those and plant them up into containers. Then I keep them under grow lights or in a really warm, sunny window. I keep them there until around Mother's Day when I can then plant them out in the garden. They will start growing and I will already have a couple sets of leaves when I put them outdoors. So there's the one that has the little sprout. I'm just gonna sit it down in some dirt as if I was planting it in the garden. Now, most of the time, you wanna put your tubers on the side, but this one, the little start is growing straight up. So I'm gonna put it in just like this. Now, I'm just adding some dirt all around it and I leave the little bit of the stem sticking out and a little bit of that green tip. That's just the way I do it. And then I will water this just a little bit. I'll probably only water it weekly and it's going to go back into the sunshine. Now, I'm evaluating the other tubers that I had in my container. And unfortunately, this one has not sprouted and I don't see any eyes that are popping out. I'm gonna go ahead and put it back in the soil and give it a few more weeks. Some tubers are really slow. Now, this one, I can see a little eye that has popped out. It doesn't have any greenery yet, but that's okay. We have a viable tuber because we have a eye that is prominent and it's about to kind of burst forth with that green foliage. So I'm gonna go ahead and pot this one up as well. Now, the reason I like to pot my dahlias and let them grow indoors is because in zone 7B, we get a lot of rain and our soil really doesn't warm up until around mid-May. I have found that if I put my dahlias in the ground, cold turkey, so no pre-sprouting in mid-May, I don't have blooms until almost August. So I miss almost two months of my dahlias growing strong and beautiful and having all those great blooms. So I have found it really works great if you have this space to pre-sprout. Now, here's another tuber that is still asleep. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that tuber. I'm just gonna give it a little bit longer. So today I put four pre-sprouted tubers into containers. This is an option that you can do. You don't have to, but I thought I'd share it with you. Now, my next big project is my dahlias seedlings. So last summer I let some of my flowers go to seed. So I let them just stay on the plant until they got nice and crispy and had tons of seeds. I collected bags and bags of dahlias seeds. So what I did is I pre-sprouted in these trays. I just put in a couple inches of dirt and I sprinkled the seedlings in. I had no idea how these would do and if they would actually germinate. Well, as you can see, I was very successful. I am so excited at the amount of seeds I was able to get. And now I have no idea what these will look like because they were open pollinated, which means they were just growing in my garden and the bumblebees or flies were pollinating from flower to flower. So these are gonna be just a beautiful mix and I'm really excited to see how they turn out. So all I'm doing now is I'm actually sizing these up. So since I had so much success, I am going to pot these into some containers. Now I'm gonna have way more dahlias than I can use, but there's no way I could throw my sweet babies out. So I'm gonna go ahead and pot up as many as I can. The larger ones, I'm gonna plant as single dahlias and I'll probably, for some of the small ones, put two in each four inch container. Now these will go back under grow lights and they're gonna continue to grow and they will double or even triple in size before it's time to go out in the ground. My plan for these is to share them with some gardening friends. I'm a member of a gardening club and I may even try to sell some in our local community Facebook group or just share them with neighbors that wanna try their hand at growing some dahlias. I still have tons of seeds actually in my growing space that I wasn't even able to use this year. So if you have interest in collecting seeds from your dahlias, it is such an easy process. You could even just save maybe two to four blooms and you are going to get tons of seeds. I would say that each bloom I saved probably had 25 or more seeds and they are large seeds which makes it really easy to save. So you can see here I'm putting two in some of these containers because they're tiny and they're just going to continue to grow. Now I often get questions about do I get tubers? So yes, these little seeds, once you plant them in the ground, they will grow tubers during the growing season. They are gonna be small tubers and I actually did save a few of mine from last year and I have them now that are already potted up and I will be putting those in the ground. So it's a really fun process. Now you can get dahlia seeds from online vendors. You can even find them at the dollar store. Dahlia seeds are just a great option. Now you're not going to get large dinner plate style dahlias. Those are actually bread and the tubers help form those but these are gonna be almost like a mix of a Cosmo and a Xenia. They're sturdier than a Cosmo and the blooms are a little larger. The bumblebees love them and I think they're really magical and beautiful in the garden. So it might be something fun that you wanna try next year. So I was excited to get all of these seedlings potted up. Now I still had a ton left and so I just took a large tray and spread out the baby seedlings to let them grow. I think I'm gonna get some six packs and put some of those starts in there so that I can give them away to some friends again and neighbors. So a very fun project but I definitely got more than I had expected and there's just not any way I could throw these seeds out. They are gorgeous. I'm already thinking of where I can put them in my garden and who all I can share them with. All right, so there's my table full of Dahlia seedlings and Dahlia tubers. Those are gonna all go back under grow lights and in a warm space. Again, I'll start hardening them off the 1st of May and I will definitely give you an update. So next, I wanted to move on to my last project of the day which is going to be repotting some Tomatillo plants. So the Tomatillo plants was an experiment as well that I did this year. Aren't these Dahlia seeds beautiful? They are really, really pretty and such a fun project that I hope you'll consider doing if you grow Dahlias. So next up, I was at a garden center in California and saw seeds for Tomatillos. If you're not familiar with those, they're used a lot in Mexican, authentic Mexican cooking. They are a type of green tomato but they're very flavorful. They work great to make salsa with. You can do an avocado Tomatillo crema salsa. You can put them in dishes and they're just amazing but they have a very long growth cycle. I think it's over 180 days and in zone 7B, it can often be hard to get fruit. So I went ahead and started these incredible tomato type plants in January and you can see they have done tremendous. They have loved growing in my basement grow space area under the grow lights. I even have some blooms and some early fruit. I am not gonna pick that off. I'm gonna go ahead and see what happens if I let the blooms continue. So what I'm gonna do today is actually transplant these out of their four inch pots. A couple of reasons for that. I think the roots are a little bit, they're getting a little crowded. Second, I wanna bury them a little bit deeper. Now I didn't have any really large containers but this container here, it's like a long narrow one, is a little bit deeper and I'm gonna put the soil all the way to the top. You want to treat these just like you would a tomato plant. So the little kind of feathery quality to a tomato plant is where it will make roots. So look at these gorgeous roots on this tomatillo. I just can't believe it. Now the tops of the stem above the root base actually will make more roots. It's gonna help have a sturdier plant and a plant that can produce more fruit. So you can see I'm actually burying this and I'm gonna continue to add soil all the way up to the rim of the container. This will allow this tomatillo plant to get stronger and really be able to stand some height and make lots of fruit. So I'm just gonna transplant the ones, the seedlings that I have. I think I have six or seven and I'm gonna put them as many containers as I can find. Now they are actually gonna go in my cold frame and stay there to grow on in the bright sunshine and in the warmth of the cold frame. If we get a cold snap below freezing, I will bring them indoors, but I'm hoping that throughout April they can manage outside and then I can put them in the garden the 1st of May. So if you grow tomato plants indoors and you start them really early, this could be an option, but you would need to size them up. I think that's the thing to consider with growing seeds. If you start early, you'll probably need to size up, which is what I did today with the dahlias and the tomatillos. If you start a little later, you typically can go straight out into the garden. It's just a preference, but for these, it's a test and I wanted to see if I could grow them and if I can get fruit. So I will keep you updated on my tomatillo journey, but I'm gonna let you see how I finished potting these up and I just wanna thank you for watching and let me know what you're growing, what you're working on in your garden right now. I can't wait to get all these plants planted out in my veggie space and out in the garden in just a few weeks. We're almost there.