 Hi there, welcome to the channel and welcome to pepper planting time. So I am getting everything set up to do my peppers, starting them indoors. It is approximately 10 weeks until our last frost date here on the Saskatchewan prairies, which is usually around the third week of May. I usually try to keep my peppers indoors or harden them off at the end of May and don't really usually plant them out until early June because they are one of the tender vegetables that we try growing here in our cold climate and lots of times we get a surprise frost at the end of May sometimes. So just to be safe, I like to keep my peppers moving indoors and outdoors a little longer than my other vegetables and planting them out early June. So really we're probably about 12 weeks from that, it is mid-March right now. But I'm excited to get them going and I have four different varieties I'm going to plant this year. I've made the decision not to plant any hot peppers because I realize I don't really like hot peppers, I don't do a lot of cooking with them, I make them into spices but I didn't really think I wanted to use up any extra space in my garden for something that I don't really want or eat or enjoy too much so my sister-in-law always makes beautiful salsa with jalapeno peppers every fall so I'll let her keep doing that for me and that's about the only other thing that I would want hot peppers for. So one of the sweet pepper varieties I've been growing for three, two, three years now is a sweet Italian frying pepper. These seeds were sent to me in a seed exchange I did a couple years ago in Hickory Croft Farms in Ontario sent me some of their seeds that they harvested. I grew them indoors and outdoors over the last couple years and I started collecting my own seeds and got a nice supply of them here. So one of the ones I'll be growing, King of the North is a good standard pepper to grow if you like a good sweet pepper that's got a nice solid flash they are usually just a green pepper that if it can be outside long enough or we have a nice long growing season they will turn red as well and this was another one that I bought it's a rainbow blend because I don't very often get much more than green peppers and maybe the odd one like the sweet Italian that turns red but this is also supposed to have a orange variety, orange bell, a purple beauty and a golden California wonder. So we'll see it says every seed, every plant will produce a different color so don't know what I'm going to get so I'm going to try planting up six of these in my cells here and hopefully we get a nice variety of colors. And the last one that I picked up that I didn't know there was such a thing was a sweet banana pepper I always tried to grow hot banana peppers but didn't know there was such thing as a sweet so we will be trying those as well I could see those will be a nice fresh eating pepper you know for salads or just to eat with some dip. I'm hoping my King of the North and the rainbow I'll get a good crop where I can you know chop up and freeze my peppers because I really like using peppers in my cooking you know having them pre chopped and frozen they are great to throw into a lot of different meals so hoping this year that I actually get a harvest that I can preserve for the winter. So I have got my containers ready here with my seed starting mix that I have made myself and what I've done is I've got them in a tray that I will be bottom watering I've put a couple inches of water in here about about an hour ago and it has soaked up all the water so these are nice and moist and ready for the seeds. So I just use some kind of a little stick to make a hole and I usually try to plant two seeds per cell just to make sure we get some germination. I have seen on some videos and some Googling that I've done on you know on peppers that you could keep two plants together in the cell right up until planting and plant them together apparently they kind of protect each other and they can grow close together like that so if I turns out that I have two good strong plants in a cell I might just keep them there until they go out in the garden and see how it goes. So I'm just Googling some fun facts here about peppers and most of us probably know this we refer to them as a vegetable but they are actually a fruit because they flower and they have seeds inside and what I'm reading here is that red peppers actually have twice as much vitamin C as a green pepper. So I guess letting them ripen is you know that's one of the benefits you get if you can ripen your peppers. I find that some summers you know if we don't have a particularly warm summer a lot of you know cool spells that peppers don't do as well they they like a lot of heat and sometimes at the end of August we get early frost and that pretty much finishes the whole pepper season unless you you know can keep them covered or move them indoors. So every year it's for me it's kind of just to wait and see what kind of a pepper harvest I end up with. It also says here that bell peppers have the highest level of vitamin C of any produce item. So a pepper can provide you more than 300% of your daily requirement of vitamin C. So just another reason to keep peppers in your daily diet. So I have planted up some of the rainbow ones here and now we're doing the king of the north. As I said most of these start out as green peppers and if you can keep them on the vine as long as possible they will ripen and turn into other colors. So we will see what we can get to the end of the season. So I am just putting them about a quarter of an inch below the surface here and then just lightly tamping them and covering them up. Of course I'm gonna end up with way more pepper plants that I need or that I want to actually put into my garden. I'm hoping you know if I have good success with them and they turn into some nice sized plants I usually just end up giving them to other friends and family to try and spread them around and hopefully help somebody else grow some peppers. So another good thing about the sweet pepper versus the hot pepper they are a little bit faster to maturity. They have a shorter growing period. Hot peppers they recommend you start them earlier and of course they thrive in heat. So these ones are all around that 75 day to maturity so that is when you actually put them in the ground not when we're planting them today. So if I have these out in the garden first part of June I should hopefully be seeing some peppers ready to harvest early to mid-August. So peppers usually germinate within 7 to 14 days. You could have faster germination if you put these on a seed heating mat which I usually do a seedling mat. I have my flowers back there on it right now but this year I'm gonna try something different. I'm going to try starting my peppers inside my grow tent. Normally like I say I'm doing it on a shelf on a heat mat under some lights but my my grow tent has been so wonderful for growing food all winter and I've kind of cleaned it out today and made some room so I've put a table in there. We're going to try setting these in the grow tent a little closer to the light. It's very nice and warm in there which peppers love. They like nice warm heat to germinate. So we'll see if I have a success using my grow tent this year to start my peppers and also plan hopefully if I make room for it I will be doing my tomatoes in there which we'll be planting probably in the next couple days as well. So that will probably be on the next video. So the soil here is pretty moist. I don't really need to spritz it too much but I'll just give it a little bit here and then I always like to do a little bit of amiculite on the top just to help hold in that moisture control damping off and you know that little bit of mold that sometimes can creep up on top of your soil here and then I will be using this humidity dome to cover them and I'll take you over to the grow tent and show you my setup. As you can see I could probably fit some more stuff in here as well so I need to maximize the use of space here and see what other things maybe I want to get started underneath this humidity dome. Okay so here is what's going on in my grow tent right now. About an hour ago it was very messy. There was a lot of dead foliage in here. I removed my two cucumber plants that I had going all winter long. They were trailing all over these ropes and I just picked the last cucumber off of the plant today and sent it in Preston's lunch. Told him that was the last one. He was very upset to think that he has to wait until summertime to have any more garden cucumbers. So I think I might start another cucumber seed and you know growing it in the crack key method in the tent here. I think I could probably manage it you know through the spring and you know by before summer hits we can have some fresh cucumbers again. This is my salad that I it just keeps giving and giving. I love growing lettuce indoors using the crack key method. If you've been watching my videos I've been growing lettuces using the the I do or the Hortos or an arrow garden which works really good for the greens. This is my experimental sweet potatoes that I just potted up a couple weeks ago. Gonna keep them here in the grow tent until I can move them outside or move them into a sunny window upstairs. They have a very long growing season so growing sweet potatoes in a cold climate like I live in is you know it's a lot of work. I'm not sure if I'll ever do it again but we're gonna see if we have success and I got two dwarf tomatoes going in the corner. I had done a video about I don't know six weeks ago. I started one in the arrow garden and one in the crack key system and the arrow it got so big in the arrow garden it was just suffering so I moved this one here from the arrow garden into crack key so it's just in nutrient water it's got some really gnarly looking tomatoes coming. This is a dwarf wild fred I believe and this one's a dwarf I think Siberian can't really remember the names but they're both gonna give me some tomatoes soon so that's great and up here I've set up this table now so this is where the peppers are going to be started and I thought it would be better for them to be closer to the light rather than sitting on the floor for when they germinate. I'm hoping it's not too strong of a light here but I will kind of monitor and see how it's going. So that's my little grow tent tour for today and I hope you enjoyed watching me plant up all my sweet peppers for this year's outdoor garden. So if you enjoyed this video I would love it if you hit that like button leave me a comment and don't forget to subscribe and keep watching for future videos coming to the channel. Thanks for watching and happy gardening!