 Hi there and welcome to the channel. So we are approaching mid-February 2023 and this is the time of year when I and I'm sure most of you who love to garden get very excited about planning our garden for the outdoor summer season. So if you're like me you're probably going through seed catalogs and ordering a lot of seeds online and going through your stash of seeds that you have from last year. Making those decisions on whether you're going to try something new or what's going to get crossed off the list this year. So I'm just going to go through a few of the things that I have planned for this year's outdoor garden and I'd like to take you downstairs to my indoor gardening space. If you follow my channel you know that I do year round gardening here on the Saskatchewan Prairies. So I have a lot of things on the go downstairs it's time to make that shift and get things set up so that I can start seedlings and get planning for my outdoor garden. So it's going to be a bit of a transition period now for the next couple months. I have a grow tent full of lettuce, cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers that I've been growing all winter and I'm really anxious to try and use my grow tent for starting seeds and some plants for outside. I also have three DWC systems going, an arrow garden and I do and a Hortues system that I got more tomatoes, herbs, lettuces going. So there's a lot going on in the basement. I'm trying to propagate some flowers for my outdoor garden in the basement. So we're gonna head down there shortly and I will show you what's going on down there. So one thing I love watching is people's seed videos where they're talking about you know how they store their seeds and what seeds they've purchased this year and what they're gonna be planting and this is my seed box from four years ago that I used to keep all my seeds in. It's very pretty, it's got a nice little label but it is not near big enough anymore. So this is where I keep all my flower seeds for now and this is what I use now for storing my seeds in. So a lot of people use a similar type container. This is just a rubber maid that I purchased from the store and in here I have several plastic containers. I purchased you know like a 10-pack or 20-pack at the Dollarama and then I just have them sorted in categories in all these different containers. So this is working well. It's keeping me very organized and I've been going through my seeds and I'm just going to show you a few new things that I'm going to be trying in the garden this year and maybe show you a few things that got crossed off the list this year. So I think the one type of vegetable that every year you got to just try something new is tomatoes. I love growing tomatoes. I love starting them from seed indoors and I like trying a whole variety of them. So this year I picked out four new varieties. So I got two new tomato seeds from Heritage Harvest Seed. One is called the mortgage lifter and the Manitoba tomato. So I think these are both large slicing type tomatoes and I also picked up two indeterminate varieties. So this one here would be like a Roma. It's called the Mamma Mia and I also picked up the cherry sun sugar and I probably have about 10 more varieties of tomatoes here in my little box that I have to try and decide which ones I'm going to try and which ones you know I'm going to just knock off the list. I'm not really sure this doesn't really fit into the tomato family but for some reason I have it in with my tomatoes and it's something that I wanted to just mention as one of my favorite things that I grew last year and that was ground cherries. These seeds came from Hickory Croft Farm which is another channel. I will link them below that they are in Ontario Canada. They sent me these in a seed exchange. So these Aunt Molly's ground cherries are if you've never had them before. It's basically kind of a berry that grows in on a kind of a vining sprawling plant to kind of have a little shell on them so that when they ripen that shell kind of dries and you peel them open and there's this sweet little berry in there or a ground cherry. So last summer my daughter and grandson were living with us over the summer and Little Henderson spent so much time in the garden with me last year. You've probably seen them in a lot of my videos if you've watched them and he absolutely loved these. It was so much fun to come out to the garden every evening and find a few of these little ground cherries, you know unwrap that little shell and find a sweet berry in there. So if you have grandchildren or you have small children and just want to have something fun in your garden, ground cherries is a great thing to have. Carrots is always something that I will always have in my garden and I didn't realize how challenging carrots can be to grow. My grandmother always had beautiful rows of carrots in her garden and so did my mom and I never really thought that they were that hard to get going but you know I've kind of learned over the last couple years how to do that. It's best to find some that have the shorter days to maturity so I looked for the Nante Corlis and the Smokum Baby. These are two new varieties that I've picked up this year that I'm going to be trying out. I'm not sure why but I've never grown butternut squash so I picked up some of those seeds and in the fall we went to a one of those corn mazes that they have out in the country and they had a whole bunch of exotic type pumpkins and gourds and squashes that you could purchase so I collected all the seeds from those three. So these aren't necessarily ones that you might want to eat but they make a really nice decoration in the fall on your table or out on your doorstep so I've collected the seeds from these mini pumpkins and gourds and I'm hoping that I can get some more going this year and kind of get my own special pumpkin patch going that my grandson will enjoy as well. So this is another thing I purchased online and these are wildflower seeds that I purchased from a local seed company called Blazing Star Wildflower Seed Company. So this box here contains 10 different native wildflowers that are perennial type flowers that should grow well in our climate. I'm in Zone 3 Saskatchewan Canada and so I'm going to be trying these in two different methods. They are recommended to be cold stratified so I have them in my freezer right now and you can plant them out in the yard early spring or first part of June depending on the variety here and I'm also going to be setting them up using the winter sowing method. So right now we are at mid February so we are about 14 weeks away from our last frost date so don't really need to get too many things going. I've got onions started because those have a long growing period and they can go out into the yard usually early spring you know a few weeks before the last frost date. One thing I'm going to get going on pretty soon is flowers. I have bags and bags and bags. Many many many bags of seeds that I've collected from my garden. I got snap dragons, petunias, I've got some marigolds. I think I have about six different colors of petunias. So in the fall before we get a really hard frost I just go out and clip off several branches from my petunia plants and I don't really worry about gathering the seeds out of them right away. I just put them in brown bags let them dry out over the winter so in the next week or so I need to go through all these and see what kind of seeds I got and get them going indoors. Another fun little project I'm going to try is see if I can propagate and root some store-bought rosemary. If you've ever tried to grow rosemary from seed it takes a long time. I do have some that I'm trying to start from seed downstairs but I thought maybe we could take some sprigs of store-bought rosemary. I've seen videos on people doing this just clean off some of the leaves here put them in some water and see if you can get them to root. I think there's about 10 or so sprigs here so if I can get you know half of these going and get a good start on some rosemary I think it'll be worth it. This little bundle of rosemary cost me $1.99 at the grocery store. So some of the things that I've scratched off my list this year for the garden are hot peppers. I don't even like hot peppers I don't know why I keep growing them but I decided I'm just going to focus on sweet peppers. I'm looking for varieties that have you know the shortest date of maturity because our season is very short and peppers like lots of heat so those are something that I'm going to start from seed fairly soon but I'm going to just stick with sweet peppers like green peppers, king of the north and I have another variety called a candy cane pepper so I'll get those going soon and I tried eggplant last year didn't like it probably won't grow it again. Cucamelons that was something that I challenged myself with for a couple years and actually last year I had a really nice plant full of cucumbers. It was another fun plant for my grandson to go and pick those and find those tiny little cucumbers. We snacked on them but didn't really find them that great. I did make a pickled batch of them but nobody seemed to really care for them so Cucamelons probably not again and I grew about five or six different kinds of squash last year so I'm going to try to narrow it down to the butternut, the spaghetti, the zucchini, those are our three favorite. So this is my basement growing space here that I use all winter long to do my indoor growing and propagating and I got some succulents going here I do a lot of propagating of house plants and whatnot and this is where I will be doing all my seedling starts so basically my setup is a rack here that I believe I picked up at Canadian Tire or Walmart and then I have lights attached underneath each shelf. I use these chains here with little S hooks to adjust the light so I can lower them and move them up as the as the plant start to grow and then I just have another setup under this shelf as well and can also do it in the bottom if I need to. So this here is the makings of a fun little project that I started in the fall. I went through my coleus plants that I have growing in containers outside took cuttings and this would have been last September brought them in put them in water got them to root and then planted them up in containers. So I just want to show you the original three where these three plants whoops the original three were these three plants here and I also took some potato ivy here so I got two kinds of potato ivy I have three four different varieties of coleuses and all winter long I've been cutting and rooting and cutting and rooting and multiplying these into many many plants I have more up top here that you can't see in the camera but my thinking was you know these are such wonderful fillers in pots in your garden why not just keep them as a house plant throughout the winter and then start propagating them you know January I actually started propagating a little sooner than that so I've ended up with many beautiful coleus plants here problem is now I need the space to start my seeds so I have to probably move these into a sunny window now eventually they can go out into the garage which is heated and sit in a window but come June when it's time to set these up outside I'm going to have a really good supply that basically didn't cost me anything so from what I've read and heard growing sweet potatoes in our cold climate here growing zone three is a quite a challenge they have a very long growing season and they like very warm soil and we don't have all the the things that you really need to grow sweet potatoes successfully here but I'm going to give it a try I started rooting these about a month ago and they are ready for the next step and that is cutting off all these little slips and rooting them in some water and then once they're rooted they will go into a container I'm going to move them into my grow tent and let them grow in there probably for a good month or so so they're going to get a really good start indoors and then when it's warm enough I will put them put this container outside I'll probably will just go one container see how it goes and I will be making a video from start to finish on trying to grow sweet potatoes in a cold climate so a few weeks ago I did a video on starting onions indoors using this method also have a bunch started in the winter sowing method and as you can see they are coming along really nicely so this is what my grow tent is looking like right now I've got strawberries I got a new batch of lettuce coming I have cucumbers growing I've been harvesting cucumbers every few days I got tomatoes I've got some beef steaks here that are I've harvested a few ripe ones and I got another tomato plant coming here but I really need want to use this space to try some seed starting I have a plan to maybe start some melons in pots in here to get a good you know month head start on them before moving them outside so I'm going to slowly have to wean out the winter garden and get ready for the spring planting so like I said I'm going to be really doing some cleaning and reorganizing here down in my indoor growing space and get started on all my seedlings getting things ready for the outdoor garden so I'll be making videos of everything that I'm doing and I hope that you will continue to follow along so if you enjoyed this video please leave a comment below hit that like button and don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss out on future videos coming to the channel thanks for watching and happy gardening