From past experience, the best thing to do now is to HOS them into containers of their own for the winter and then you can plant them next spring.

new gallon jugs would work fine for them. You will just have a bunch of extra containers around for the winter. I've done this, left them out back inside my fenced in yard area that faces South and they have been fine all winter, under deep snow cover, I planted them as soon as I could get them out and the ground was warm enough, end of May, the foxglove bloomed their hearts out that spring and the hostas did fine as well.

Fran

I'd cut them into hunks and stick them in the ground. The ground will be warmer than a container, and I figure they'd have a better chance.

I've planted out teeny, tiny seedlings in fall and they did well. A couple of years ago I summer sowed a few things late that weree still tiny in fall. I planted them in the ground anyway, they were stomped by deer over winter, but still survived just fine.

Karen

I would get them into the ground now and let ma nature take care of them. In my world if they need to be coddled, they go. I let things take a chance and the strong survive.

PM2, I keep forgetting that you are a zone warmer than I am. In my zone the chances of failure to survive the winter are much greater than 50%.

In you zone, I would do what bakemom and kqcrna advised, break them into hunks and plant them out now.

If you don't have time to get all of the hunks planted out, then go to plan B and just plant the hunks into large containers with about 4 inches of soil in them and winter them over

If you don't want to or have time to plant any of them out, then the next step would be to break them up into hunks and plant the hunks in their own containers for the winter.

Plan C would just leave them alone for the winter and some, if not all, should survive.

Fran

Since I only have a couple of containers, it won't be a problem planting them out and hunk of seedlings sound like that might work out better than trying to tease apart about 50 seedlings with intertwined roots and planting out individually.. Okay, I'll get them in the ground. THANKS!!

If you don't get them planted or potted up leave them as they are and sink the container in the ground for the winter. Mulch well.

Seems every year I have at least one or two jugs that overwinter in my veg. bed. In the spring I plant them HOS.

A couple years ago I had seedlings (including hostas) that were just too tiny to plant out, so I did HOS into 4" plastic pots that I had on hand. I don't know that the size of the pot was important. When the annuals in my raised bed traveled to the compost heap, I sank the pots in the raised bed for the winter. In spring, most were doing ok (I lost maybe 10%) and I planted them out after they gained a little size