welcome to my first vegetable garden today I want to show you how you can start perennial roots indoors and save yourself a lot of money this is a light respec ADA or Blazing Star and it gets its name because it makes these trails of purple flowers that look like a shooting star and I have these in my front yard in my backyard I really really enjoy them they have really fine feathery purple flowers this clump is probably two or three years established but once they're established you'll get lots of purple spikes in your garden it's a perennial which means it will come back year after year so I'm in Maryland zone seven when the ground freezes these roots survive and then they'll send up flowers or the greenery the following year 25 roots for five dollars and 38 cents that's really inexpensive if you are going to go buy a blazing starting container like this it might cost you two or three dollars if you bought it in a quart container that can cost six seven or eight dollars I started these about 6 weeks ago for the sake of the video and I'll talk about them shortly once you pick out your roots or pick out your flowers the roots are going to be in different sizes get them into water let them absorb water for about an hour or two that just helps them get started for containers this size if you don't have these containers use a Styrofoam cup but for something about a container about this size you want the root ball to be somewhere between a single root ball or double the size and and it's just because these containers aren't going to hold a bigger root so if you get a perennial that has a larger root ball just get a bigger container so after these soak about an hour to you're gonna get them into containers fill this up some pack it down and I've done this in a lot of videos you want a nice solid starting vase once you have the starting base pull the root out look for the sides that have the root hairs and that goes facedown right into your trail and move this goes facedown right into your tray and you can do you know a whole lot very very quickly just press it in and you're good to go these are going to be about an inch deep the instructions say two inches when you're planting them in these containers the depth doesn't have to be perfect you just want to get them started and you can make adjustments later when you take them out into the ground so once you have it pressed in you're gonna cover it up gently press in that soil and you're good to go so the timing these were started six weeks ago you can see how big they got you want to time your perennial bulbs for when you would for when they would start to grow the greenery out in your garden even though these are winter hardy they don't like growing until the temperatures get about 50 degree evenings a nights and warmer days so you figure out when that time is in your zone and you count back about 4 to 6 weeks so this is 6 weeks worth of growth and the grand I started these early just for the sake of the video and you can see how nicely the root system set up these are starting to actually get a little root balance so they're gonna have to go into bigger containers but you want to time it so the roots just start reaching the bottom and then just start slightly kind of filling in that space and you would just break this up drop it into the ground and your perennials established you've got 6 weeks worth of of growth time already started and it's realistic that you could get a bloom this year sometimes when you start these root balls in the ground your perennial plant will come up it'll establish but it doesn't flower so it takes about a year for that to happen and again this is a great way to save money 25 roots for 5 dollars and 38 cents plus the cost of the starting material is really inexpensive when you can fill up a whole front yard or backyard with perennial flowers hope you enjoyed the video please check out my blog at to garden at blogspot.com and also check out my youtube videos thanks