Opening the Seed Starting Studio PLUS Transplanting Cactus Seedlings

It’s February, and that mean’s its time to think about seed starting and other garden jobs to be done soon. Let’s get the Seed Starting Studio up and running for the season! And, as a bonus, let’s take care of some cactus seedlings that have been neglected, see if we can get them to grow and thrive this year.

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hi friends welcome to Harmony Hills Home and Garden I’m Jenny and we live and garden here in Baltimore Maryland Zone 7 I’m down in my basement today getting my seed starting Studio set up for the coming season um I thought I would share with you what I’ve got going on here how I set up myself a little gardening space in my basement and then together I thought we might uh transplant some seedlings that I actually started last year that have lived this entire season and grown this much and need to be taken care of so come with me and let’s uh fuss around and play around here in the seed starting [Music] studio now I have shared in the past what uh is all in my setup here but I thought we could do a quick overview again and uh maybe give you some ideas for how you might set your stuff up although everybody’s needs are different and everybody’s working styles are different so of course I would never assume that you might want to copy everything that I’m doing just thought I would give you some ideas so let me turn the camera around and get going here so when you come down the basement stairs by the way we live in a 100y old house with uh cement block walls and a concrete floor it’s not a finished basement um it’s got you know 100y old wiring Plumbing Etc um it’s a large basement Space full of junk over there don’t look but here is under the stairs basically is where I’ve set up my garden sections like a potting bench slash seed starting area so I made a little u-shape area it’s about 6 by6 I would guess in terms of the space that I’m using uh this is just a cheap folding table that I got from Walmart that I set up here on this end as my working space and then I have two uh industrial uh metal storage shelving units that I’m using to store my equipment and then to have my lights growing on them I have this tight tray here that helps me keep the dirt a little bit contained when I’m working I ordered this online several years ago I will see if I can find a link for where you might be able to find one of these nowadays um and then let’s just start over here I basically am using shop lights as my lighting system these are LED uh LED lights in all of these and I just have them hanging on chains so that I can raise and lower them as needed when I’m in seed starting mode I’ve got lights on this shelf this shelf and the bottom most one as well but I rarely use all three systems at the same time only at the height of spring seed starting I’ve overwintered some of my winter house plants in here and some of them really struggled because I basically forgot to water them from the time I put them down here in November until I don’t know a week ago in January so a lot of them are struggling but I’m hoping to be able to pull them back around so this isn’t a house plant tour but in general just share with you that I have some succulents in here one Orchid uh fish tail or fishbone uh Cactus there’s some um trus Cana a couple of bowls full of succulents and some more trus Cana spider plant that I whacked back fully and completely last week and now look how much it’s grown since then and then a dress Cena back in there and these are two uh amarillis bulbs that I found that were just hanging out looked like they might be viable got some growth going on in there so I thought I would pot them up and see what they do over on these shelves on the bottom is where I store my uh potting mixes I’ve got seed starting mix I’ve got some Cactus mix and some uh what is that that’s probably just vermiculite right there a couple of different small bags of things and I have larger quantities of soil in other places this shelf is where I store my seeds although on this shelf I’ve got a random assortment of seeds that I have pulled out and was working with that I’ve ordered and haven’t sorted and that I uh haven’t uh you know these ones that I harvested from my garden so those need to be taken care of but I’ve got a lot of seeds here I’m just using Dollar Tree organization bins to store them with just the most rudimentary uh alphabetical sorting system made out of cardboard tabs so nothing costly here just you know try to Corral things into organization that makes sense to me up here this is where I have all my tags this is protection equipment and some specialty um uh fertilizers back there and then this is just random tools and equipment that I use various things my Snips and then these are the self-watering um seed starting trays from Gardener Supply they live here as a little collection on this shelf I’ve got some but not all of my pots that I ordered these are from um can’t remember the name of the place I got those but I’ll put it on the screen and I have a lot more of these of all different sizes in another place in the house colored pencils camera equipment Etc so just random storage and shelving um a collection of pots some of these are beautiful and lovely and uh collectible other of these are from the Dollar Tree so you know there’s my terrarium that failed and just random storage of various things all over the place uh and then that’s the door to the garage that is under the house and then here’s where I have my larger systems of soil I just bought this Happy Frog potting mix the other day and and I’m planning to mix this with this coconut core and perlite last year I used coconut core and perlite to make a potting mix to use for my seed starting uh it worked okay but the lack of fertilizer in it and lack of any real um organic material made my seedlings uh it was difficult for me to know when to fertilize them to help them grow better so this year I’m going to be mixing this beautiful Happy Frog rich in organic uh matter soil with this mix so hopefully by mixing the Happy Frog that’s got organic material in it more so than just coconut core with the coconut core to lighten it up and the perlite to further lighten it up hopefully that’ll be a nice mix for my seedlings that once they are ready for fertilizer they won’t be relying on me to time it correctly and maybe miss it and maybe starve them I also have a couple of these containers again came from the Dollar Tree that I use for mixing soils up up this bag is actually full of compostable material as I have uh organic waste I put it in there and I’ll just dump that out on the compost pile once it’s too heavy to carry or just before it’s too heavy to carry and then back in here a couple of other pots just for storage and some dead light bulbs that I haven’t gotten rid of and random random basement basemy stuff and so for the purposes of making YouTube videos that aren’t too dark uh let me share with you the lighting uh system that I’ve set up for myself down here as I sit and work at this table this is the view that I have of the basement so I’ve got two light boxes they’re on stands they just have um you know bright white lights inside and they shine light nicely down here on this table they were very inexpensive if you’re interested to know what they are I’ll just message me or put a comment down and I’ll share that but not everybody needs a lighting system for their needs so so that’s basically what I’ve got going on here in the studio so today’s project is I have these C practice that I started from seed last year in January with my grandkids um and they look like little sea urchins uh not every cell has some in it but some do and I thought well first of all they lived outside all winter long until today I just brought them in they are dry they are um cold they may be dead I don’t know but they may just be dormant and waiting for me to care for them so I thought what I would do is um prick them out of these uh seed starting trays and then put them in a pot and then try to care for them and see if they come back to life now if they don’t then I will have at worst spent some time and um you know not get anything for my effort but I have the soil I have a container I have the seedlings so I might as well try and get them uh any sort of conditions where they might be able to grow so let’s see how we can go about doing that okay because these are cactuses I’m going to use this potting mix that is designed for cactuses that means it has good drainage it’s lighter it’s not going to hold on to moisture basically you water the cactus the water runs through wets The Roots a little bit of water maintained on the soil but most of the water goes through and so that the cactuses don’t rot so this is a Miracle Grow product it does have synthetic fertilizer in it I’m okay with that I’m not eating these products so let’s see what am I going to put these into I think I’ll put them into this little Clay Pot here and try to get all of them that I have into this one container I’m going to use some special tools though because they’re probably prickly all right so I have this uh iced tea spoon that I use sometimes for potting and pricking things out it’s nice and long and can reach down into places I’ve got a couple of pair of tweezers one of them has this bent nose on it so I might be able to reach in and get things other than uh what this one can do so I think between that these tools I’ll be able to hopefully pot up these cactuses without getting Pricks in my fingers all right so the soil is probably pretty dry so let me moisten some soil up nothing like playing in the dirt right getting Gardener’s manicure going here in the early part of February that feels good if we can’t be outside at least we can do something inside all right so I’m just going to put the soil in here yeah there is old soil in there but do as I say not as I do probably should have cleaned that out in case it held any diseases or something all right so I’m just going to make it about a/ half an inch from the rim of the pot there we go so let’s take a look at these a little bit closer see if we can get some Focus going on here there we go all right so these little guys are pretty small and Pokey so I’m going to see if I can get them out without poking myself so I was thinking I could use these tweezers to see if I can lift out these little guys without damaging them or without damaging myself so it looks like yes I was able to do that good now let’s see if I can get them planted in here set it down in there and then tuck it [Music] in [Music] looks pretty good so I’m going to try that [Music] again [Music] I think that’s pretty promising it’s like there’s two little guys here there’s like one here and one here so I’m just going to transplant them [Music] together [Music] now there are a lot in this pot uh and they’re too close together certainly but uh this way I’ll be able to see which ones are viable and which ones are not and I’ll just take out the ones that die and Transplant the ones that live and hopefully we’ll have some baby cactuses growing in our uh in our house plants this year so now with the rest of this soil that was in these containers since last January I’m going to put this in my compost bin so I’m just going to put it in this bag right here that will eventually be taken out to the compost pile now there were some little baby cactuses in here that I didn’t transplant but this is plenty and I don’t know if any of them are living so I might have just spent some time on absolutely nothing that will uh work for the long term so we’ll see I’m not going to water this with overhead water right now the soil I put in there was pretty moist so now I’m just going to spray it because I don’t want to really dislodge any of the plants that I just put in there so this will hopefully put some soil up against their roots and uh then the rest of the soil will be already moist um this is way too deep they don’t need this much depth because their Roots were only like at best a quarter inch long but anyway we’ll see some of these are brown I don’t know if that means they dyed or if they just take on an amber color in the winter when they get cold I don’t even know if these are hearty in our area and we did have some temperatures down in the 10 10° Fahrenheit ranges already this winter and these were outside for that so I don’t know if they’re alive or if they’re dead some of them have a little bit of a green cast to them that makes me hope that they’re alive I don’t know we’re going to find out so I’m just going to put this over here and I will check on them and hopefully they’ll grow well thanks so much for joining me today here in the seed starting Studio or my pting bench area or my garden corner or whatever we want to call it I hope that you are are enjoying your early February I hope that you’re dreaming of your garden this year and I hope maybe you’ve gotten some dirt under your fingernails one way or another and finally I hope I’ll see you again in another video real soon take care friends bye-bye