 Hi there and welcome to Getting Clean on Prairies. So we are now heading into the first week of March. We are at March 6th and it is time to plant some more or get some more seeds started indoors. Here in Saskatchewan, Canada, we are about according to my calendar here about 12 weeks away from our last frost date which is mid-May. So I am just looking at what my next items are that I want to start planting and I'm going to start some flowers today. I want to do some inpatients and I've got a couple different kinds of strawberries. I've started both of these using the winter sowing method so I have some of these started in milk jugs outside and I'm going to try some indoors as well and see if I can get a good start on a bunch of strawberry plants. And the other thing that I'm excited to try that is not a native plant too, Saskatchewan or Canada and that is the eucalyptus. So this is being sold as an annual plant. It's the Silver Drop eucalyptus and you can start these indoors and grow them outside in pots or in your flower beds over the summer season. They won't survive our winters of course but you can also grow them indoors as a house plant. So I'm going to try getting these started and try growing them a few different ways outdoors and probably as an indoor plant and we'll see how that goes. So today I'm going to start our seeds using the Jiffy Pete pellets here. This is a 36 pack that I'm going to start all my seeds in today and I just wanted to try them out. I've never used them before but you see them a lot and I think some of the benefits of these of course is you don't need to buy any pots, you don't need to buy any starting soil. This comes with its own container with a humidity dome to put on top and as they grow you can water this container once it's under the lights. You can also get Jiffy pellets just in bulk like this. I got a 50 pack of these also that cost 10 bucks for these 50 so pretty cheap way to start and pretty easy. So I'm going to just show you how to get these ready for our seeds and then we'll start planting. So the first thing you want to do is hydrate your Pete pellets here. So it says to use warm water. I'm going to use boiling water because I like to just take that extra step of sterilizing these just on the off chance that they may be some fungus-nad eggs in the pellets. There's probably some chance that there are but just to be extra cautious I use the boiling water so I'm using going to do it in this bowl here rather than my plastic container because it might warp it. It does say on the package how much boiling water you need to get these to expand to about one and a half, two inches. So it says for these 36 pellets to use about five cups of water and once they expand as you can see they are sucking up this water super fast and expanding. Just going to add another cup here. If there's any excess if you feel like they're big enough you can pour it off. These of course are going to be very hot so be very careful if you're using boiling water. I'm going to just let them cool down a little bit before putting them back into their container here. So you can see once they have expanded they are about one and a half inches tall once they're fully expanded so I'm going to start placing them back into the container here and get them ready. And once your peat pellets have cooled off slightly you can start, I use a chopstick here that works well. I just try to open up and loosen the soil a little bit on each of these. So the other thing about these is that you can directly plant these right into the ground. This will break down so these are all full of just 100% peat sphagnum moss and there is a lot of controversy around peat moss because it's not sustainable in a lot of countries around the world. This is Canadian peat moss and I have done a bit of research on it and what I've learned is that the peat bogs that we have in Canada are very huge and the amount of harvesting that occurs on them, the rate of growth of the peat moss that's occurring in these bogs far exceeds the amount that we harvest from them so it's considered still a sustainable process so that's good to know. So Canada is one of the few countries that is sustainable in the harvesting of peat moss. So this jiffy does use Canadian peat moss so that's good. And when you're looking at these sometimes it's kind of hard to tell the bottom from the top on some of these because sometimes the bottom opens up but the top usually has a larger opening and you can just loosen all of the soil up pretty quickly. So another little tip I just wanted to share before you start planting and that is to somehow mark if you're doing a variety of things in one tray it can be very hard to keep track of what you planted. I know the day you do it you think you're going to remember where everything is but as time goes on and you start planting a lot of stuff you start to lose track. So this was just a little tip that I learned from watching Gary on the Rusted Garden Channel. If anybody hasn't heard of him he's got a huge channel. He's a wonderful gardener in Maryland that shows you how to do everything step by step so I've learned a lot from him so I just wanted to give him credit for giving this little tip. So what I've done here is I just marked my container because it's a little hard to put markers in here and I put some tape here at the one end and then I just drew a kind of a scale of each of these pods here. So there's 36 so I'm going to be planting 9 of each type of seed. So I just wrote in here what I'm going to be planting so this this whole side here will be strawberries and then I'll have a 9 in patience and 9 of the eucalyptus. So I've already put some of my fresco strawberry seeds into this white dish and I can barely see any seeds in there I don't know. So I'm not sure how many I'm going to get out of this. I'm going to just try throwing what looks to be just little flecks of powder. I'm going to just put them in a couple just in case they don't take off I do have a lot of the alpine and they are pelleted seeds so they'll be very easy to put into each of these. So get ready to start planting. Okay so I attempted to plant into these two here some of this fresco seed but it was so tiny that I'm not sure if it's going to actually germinate or if those were real seeds I was planting but I will just mark on my little grid here that I did put the frescoes in here. So this is like I said I just mark here where I have tape on the container. So in case the container gets moved around or twisted around and you lose track of where everything is. So now we know that all the strawberries will be in these three rows right here and the second batch of strawberries the alpine are pelleted as you can see here so they are a lot easier to plant and I've already put two in each of these little pods here and just use the chopstick to give them a light covering with some of the peat and kind of spread the two out and I will thin them out later once they are germinated. So these impatience are also quite tiny seeds but still pretty easy to work with so I'm going to do the same I'm going to plant nine of these plant up nine of these pods and probably put two seeds in each just to see hopefully one of the two germinates if not both. So I'm just going to try and grab two seeds out of my palm of my hand here and put them in place. Okay and then our last nine spaces here are going to be for the eucalyptus the silver drop I don't know if you can see this but I literally probably got not more than nine seeds in this package. So there was ten seeds in that package so this last guy is going to get two seeds put in there. Okay so to get these germinating I'm going to use my DIY grow box here that I made if you haven't seen my video on where I planted some started some petunia seeds I used this DIY grow box that I made and I should give you kind of a quick instructions on how it works and how to make your own and it worked really good for sprouting my petunia seeds and I've moved them now under the grow lights but for now I'm going to just keep this in here with just the dome on top of it I'm not going to turn on the light right now and as soon as the I start to see some signs of germination I will remove the dome turn on the light and see where it how it goes from there so we're just going to cover it up and keep it in darkness so I hope you found this video helpful and that you will try starting some of your own seeds using the jiffy pellets I will just keep my little trusty grid on the shelf here down in my growing space and if I need to figure out what I have planted in here then I always have this to refer to so I hope you will like and leave a comment below and if you haven't already please subscribe to my channel and we will see you on the next video thanks for watching