What's up everyone? Welcome back to the podcast. Thank you so much for tuning in. My name's Kevin. This is the Epic gardening show. Today we're talking about choosing the best seedlings and I'm answering this question for John, who has multiple different gardens going. He has a hydroponic tower garden going and he has a raised bed on the top of his roof in Los Angeles, California.

So a really good example of growing in a small space,

he lives in a condo, but still getting a lot of yield out of it.

And his question is this, how do I choose the best seedlings? If I've started multiple seeds to guarantee germination,

how do I then thin out to the correct seeds and the best seeds for my garden.

Now this is a great question because if you listen to my other episodes

or watched my video on how to guarantee seed germination,

you'll know that what I do is I recommend

planting two to three seeds per whole, so you guarantee that you get a seed in every hole.

What happens though is that you'll often have more than one of those seeds germinate and so then you're faced with a decision. How do you choose the right plant?

Well, the best idea here and the best answer here is to pick the one that

looks the healthiest. But then the question then becomes which one looks the

healthiest? Well, you're going to want to avoid ones that have signs of damping off,

so that's where the bottom of the stem, right where it touches the soil, is starting to look a bit thin and

spindly and even has a bit of discoloration so depending on what type of

plant you're growing you're going to have usually a white or greenish stem. Some plants of

course are different, but you're looking for a thinner section of the stem and an

area that's a bit discolored relative to the standard color of that plant. That's damping off and that is a

plant that you should just cut out right away. Second, you're going to want to avoid your

spindly long plants.

So when you're thinning out,

there's going to be ones that are taller than others.

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