hello everyone and welcome to suburban sell today on the sill I'm going to share with you my ultimate guide to growing and caring for coleus the coleus was a gateway plant for me and really got me into loving house plants and gardening outdoors and so I have a real special appreciation for the coleus it's super forgiving it's really easy to propagate and really easy to grow from seed also it comes in a large variety of colors this coleus is watermelon coleus that I grew from seed from the beginning of summer and now it's just real
big and beautiful the coleus comes in all kinds of different cultivations and colors and it's just really fun to grow make sure you stick around to the end of the video where I'm going to share with you a little freebie that I've prepared as well as some tips about seed harvest so let's get started talking about the coleus I did my first seed harvest a couple years back these plants yield so many seeds that I've been sowing the same Bunch for the past couple of summers the seeds are really tiny and as long as you
keep them in a dark dry place they will last you a really long time I decided to pick up a few have already established plants to accompany my seeds that way we can look at the coleus from different stages of development and I also wanted to share some different cultivars there's so many options when choosing coleus you can really get just about any color as well as a wide variety of leaf shapes planting coleus seed is as simple as just placing them on top of your soil and then letting mother nature do the rest okay
let's just do a sprinkle like right in here you just sprinkle them maybe appear too right in here this empty spot I wanted to do a quick update on my coleus it's been super cold here form a super cold and you can see that I don't know they're not doing that great I mean they're doing fine but it's cold and they don't like the cold they don't like the cold at all but if you look close you can see I got some little baby coleus coming up from the seeds that I planted right there and
there's a few little ones right there now we've had some crazy weather I'm sure the storms have blown them all over the place but it looks like even though despite the crummy weather we're gonna get some coleus from the seeds I harvested a couple of years ago super exciting so it's officially been over a month and you can really see how much everything's filled in this right here is amazing I forget what it's called but it is just like taking over you can see all my seedlings look at how awesome they're doing in one month
they're even getting their color so you can see the pink and green one these are gonna be green with a deep deep purple they're just doing wonderfully now this has just taken over so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to cut it propagate it and put it in my move it up to my front pot so just like any simple propagation coleus is like the easiest I'm just gonna let's see how tall do I want it um this looks fine you know I'm gonna go up here I'm just gonna cut the tip off so
you can see it's got a really thick stem and I will just remove these bottom leaves I'm just gonna put it in a little cup of water and it'll probably in a week it'll grow some some stems now I don't want this top it's starting to go to seed already that's for the end of the season so we're just gonna nip that - you want it to focus on new foliage and not producing seeds I'm inside real quick just to show you my coleus cuttings look at that it's been three weeks and honestly I had
roots after week 1 but I just forgot to do the update and show you but this is like two weeks three weeks I think I'll put up there what exactly so they're totally ready to be transferred into the dirt it takes it's like nothing honestly there's two cuttings in here now because one blew over and I was lost in my landscaping for days and even those out of the water for days I plopped it back in the cup and it did fine this is another just little coleus baby that of those seeds from the beginning
of spring and I just put one in a pot just to have as like an extra little showy piece and this one might have to come in with me over the winter look at how pretty that foliage is they do great over winter - if you wanted if you had one that you loved you wanted to bring it inside and then you could take cuttings off it all year you could take cuttings and plant them outside you can do just about anything this is really a plant that you cannot mess up honestly the only thing
you could do is let it get cold and then it will hate your guts but other than that it really is just a super forgiving plant one more quick update on the progress of the coleus beautiful foliage all summer long I've got a couple different varieties in here just love the coleus so here's down here are the seeds that I had planted obviously it's kind of been taken over I normally wouldn't throw that many in but I wanted to just give a good example of how simple and easy it is to grow a beautiful arrangement
of coleus so this is going to be my final kind of foliage update the next time I'm back we're going to talk about harvesting seed so normally I would be clipping these off all summer to have the plant focusing on just growing beautiful leaves but I'm going to let them start their process of putting out seeds it takes a little while that way maybe in a couple months they'll be dry and ready ok little bug I don't know something that way they'll be ready to be harvested and that will just entail clipping this off when
it's nice and dry and I'll show you how to pull the seeds out that way you can just continue the cycle of beautiful coleus every year and this year I'm going to get some awesome varieties so it's getting closer to the time when the seeds are about ready to be harvest now you'll need to wait for your little seed pods to mature you'll kind of know that when it's ready it'll be looking dry there will be no more flowers left on it and every day when I come out here just to water I have this
little bee friend that is always just buzzing around here pollinating my coleus and I love to watch him just busy busy at work but today I noticed I have a couple ones over here that I think are going to be whoops that I think are going to be ready to go and it's extremely windy out here today but you can see this one's dry a little brown looking compared to the other ones so I'm gonna cut it off and put it in a brown paper bag and let it dry out a little bit more so
I've got my little coleus pods in my paper bag they're gonna dry out for a couple more days and as it dries out you know I might give the little bag of shake and see what flies off and you might already be some few seeds already in there that's a good sign my seeds pods have been drying in my little paper bag here for not super long it probably could go another day but I noticed that some of them were getting dry so a little tip got in my bag I'm just gonna give it a
little shake see what I can knock loose see see if we got anything knocked loose here pull these out there's still plenty of stuff on there here's a little hack tip white piece of paper fold it in half pour your whatever fell out oh yeah kinds of seeds in there you can kind of already see them not everything pretty much and then if you just give it a little tap this is let's see to the seeds just falling down in the paper I'm just gonna put them on this white plate so you can see see
the little seeds separate in there falling right off there's a bunch more in there there's a couple more falling down the little paper sieve there look at those little teeny tiny seeds one of these little pod Ling's will seedpod will hold a few different seeds see how those just fell out of there I don't know if you could see that but if you aren't able to get them all out you can go through and just pick them it's pretty tedious the bag shake method is much more efficient but now it's time for my little freebie
that I told you about at the beginning of this video so if you're like me and you like to collect seeds you're gonna need a way to store them so what I have found are these cute perfect little seed storage envelopes you're going to want to store your seeds in paper and a nice dark and temperature-controlled place this coleus that I got these seeds from is the sunset coleus so I've made some cute little labels for my envelopes tada to store my seed packets now I can write the data collection up there or whatever I
want to do I have my color on there so when I'm doing my outdoor planting next next spring I'll know what colors I want to do and also I'm gonna have so many seeds that these will make a cute little gift for my friends so I'll just store my little seeds in there see if I can get them to go in obviously you're gonna want to put more in there than that but there you go now you can download some of my pre-made seed packet templates at suburban sill com I've made a vintage one I've
made a modern style all bunch different styles some whimsical ones that you can download to create your own cute little seed packet to give away for your friends or for your own personal storage whatever floats you boat but visit suburban still calm to get that free download and I will put a link in the show notes so that you can go right there and get what you're looking for thank you so much for checking out my ultimate guide to coleus care and harvesting seeds it was really fun to make I love this plant like I've
said it's just a great plant for outdoor gardening and even indoors so thanks for stopping by don't forget to subscribe so that you'll stay up-to-date on all of the fun happenings here at suburban sale thanks and have a great day
