 Hi there welcome to the channel so in today's video I'm going to show you an easy method that you can use to start your tomatoes and peppers from seed so this is a method that I've been using for the last few years and if you've seen a lot of my videos I like to use the solo cup as my starting vessel for my seeds so so whether you grow a big garden or just have the small container garden maybe on your deck or patio or maybe you're just a beginner thinking about trying to start some of your vegetables from seed at home this is going to be a great video to show you how to do that really easily so before we get started please hit that like button so you help my channel and let's get going. Before we get started on planting up our seeds for our peppers and tomatoes I just wanted to go through some of the varieties that I use and kind of talk about why would you want to start things from seed when you can go to a greenhouse and buy those you know beautiful tomato plants all ready to go into your garden but what I love about starting them from seed myself is that you can grow so many different varieties of tomatoes there is like hundreds and hundreds of varieties if you follow any gardeners online or you do any research in tomatoes there are just so many and I'm always one that likes to try something new I love fresh tomatoes and I especially love cherry tomatoes so that that's my personal favorite so that is something that I'm focusing on this year to grow a lot of is a bunch of varieties of cherries then there's the bigger tomatoes that you can use for sandwiches like the beef steaks and the brandy wines which are great you also have the paste tomatoes like romas that you you know are great for sauces so if you go to any grocery store right now any gardening center greenhouses all that stuff you will find racks and racks of seeds you go online and you can find even more variety I've kind of got it all set up here ready to go and if you've seen some of my other videos on starting tomatoes this is a method that I've been using for a few years I call it the single solo cup method because you see a lot of times people use the double cup method so you prep your cups basically by punching holes in the bottom or just cutting little slits around the bottom so that you have room for the water to flow out it makes good for bottling watering when you have it in this tray and gives you know some air there for those roots to not get too rootbound before you get them out planted in the garden so start off I always start my seeds in a half a cup of soil so I have moistened potting soil and I have filled up all these cups just to the halfway mark roughly pack it down a little bit so that there's no air pockets so the potting mix that I put in here has some organic fertilizer in it as well so there's some food in there for those roots to feed off once they start growing but when you're starting seeds sometimes that's a little bit heavy a little bit too strong so I like to put a light layer of some seed starting mix on top just before I plant the seeds so the seed starting mix is very light it's easy for those seeds to germinate and those roots to start growing doesn't have any fertilizer in it it's strictly just usually coconut core or sphagnum moss mixed with some perlite or vermiculite so once you got that potting mix moistened it's just filling up the cup about halfway sometimes this potting mix you'll see a lot of big sticks and twigs in there you want to try to not put too many in there they just kind of make that harder for the roots to grow through so got a watch for that I said I've got it filled halfway just pack it down lightly so there's no air pockets and then I'm just going to pop it off with a little light layer of the seed starting mix and we're ready to start planting our seeds so I like to start mine in a tray like this you can use like a just a tinfoil turkey tray that you can get from a dollar store that's got like a two or three eight inch lip on it and then I just put my solo cups in there that way when it comes to watering time throughout the next month or so you can just bottom water right into the tray and these cups will wick up that water really nicely so you want to make sure you know depending on where you live what your last frost date is expected for the spring it's something you can easily Google so here in Saskatchewan Canada where I live my last frost date is about the third week of May so for tomatoes it's usually about six to eight weeks before your last frost pepper is a little bit longer you can go eight to ten but you never want to start them too soon because once they get growing you know they're hard to manage indoors and you don't want to have them getting too overgrown and gangly so there's no advantage to starting them early right now we're at the beginning of April so we are at about that seven eight week point before my last frost date so it's about a perfect time to get going so I mentioned earlier there's indeterminate and determinant varieties a determinant tomato is one that will grow to a certain size it will produce fruit and that's as far as it goes it just blooms and produces fruits and that's basically how far it goes they're great for containers or smaller spaces the indeterminate varieties are tomatoes that will keep growing and growing as long as they have the heat and they don't get frozen and they have a good trellising system they will keep growing and blooming and producing so this cherry varieties that I'm going to be starting are indeterminate so when you're planning out your garden make sure that you've picked a variety that's going to fit the container or this area that you're going to be growing in and plan accordingly so always make sure on my cup I just put a piece of tape on here masking tape or painters tape so that you can make sure you mark what your tomato plant name is you don't lose track so I usually like to plant up about two or three of the seeds into my cup here and that way you just kind of make sure that you have germination success and especially if your seeds are a little bit old you want to put a few of them in there just to make sure that they are still good I'm going to just drop them on the top here I put four in you can just push them down a little bit with your finger and add a little bit more of that seed starting on the top they don't need to be buried too deep so the reason that I always start my tomatoes in the half cup method like this is when you see the tomato start growing and this is one that I started about three weeks ago now just demonstrating in a previous video if you can see it here in the light but I'll try to I'll try to zoom in on here but you'll see there's a lot of little tiny hairs on the stem of a tomato and when those get buried in dirt those will grow into more roots so what I like to do in this method is start the seeds in a half a cup of soil like this let the plant grow above the rim of the cup and when it gets to that stage I will pinch off any of the leaves that are below the lip of the cup here and top it up with more potting soil that way you have a really good base of roots here and then as the plant grows you cover it in with more soil and all those little tiny hairs on the stem of the plant will form roots and when it's time to go out into the garden you have a really good strong root ball and probably a really healthy tomato plant. One of the main reasons that I use this method in the solo cup is because it's kind of a once and done system where you don't have to start them in you know little seedling trays and then worry about having to up paw them into these bigger cups or like a three or four inch nursery cup. This way you can start the seeds right in the solo cup here and they will stay in this cup right up until the time that you plant them out in the garden. There's lots of room for the roots to grow and develop and I've had really good luck with this end up with really strong healthy tomato plants. Hopefully in future videos I will be able to show those to you as well. Okay so I have jumped to the end here where I've got everything all planted up in my solo cups so everything has been planted up. I've marked on here the name and whether it's indeterminate or a determined variety so I can start planting out where these are all going to go in my outdoor garden. So I'm going to be just setting these under grow lights because they're kind of down a little more shallow here you know in a window might not work as well but if you have some really sunny east facing sun south facing windows you can set these in the windows as well and they should sprout okay. So I did my pepper planting a few days ago I filmed it I'm just going to flip you to that now to show you how you can easily start pepper plants as well. Some of the information in that section is going to be similar to what we did here with the tomato so let's go plant some peppers. I am trying to keep my numbers down on how many I start this is always an issue but I'm not a big pepper person I'm pretty boring when it comes to peppers but you can grow so many different kinds when you start them from seed they're just no end of variety so you can get online. My favorites are just the basic sweet peppers so King of the North pepper is the gar the green pepper so the large green sweet pepper this is a rainbow variety which is basically the same but it comes in different colors you just never know which color you're going to get those turned out really good for me last year and then as far as the hots I'm pretty boring just going to do some jalapenos so that I have them for making some paupers or maybe doing some salsa so very simple start off with your moistened potting soil because these are going to be in here right until we put them outside that's why I recommend using potting soil rather than just straight seed starting mix the potting soils got a little bit of fertilizer in it so that those plants and roots are going to get some food while they're growing in these containers just kind of pat it down so that you don't have any air pockets in there so what I've done here is I filled it up with the potting soil and then I'm going to top it up with just a little sprinkle of the seed starting mix because it's a lighter easier for the seeds to germinate I'm just going to put it on the top that kind of resembles what would happen if you were just doing these in little seed starting trays put a light sprinkle of this on top of your soil so now we're going to plant our seeds on top of this light layer of seed starting mix cover it up with some more of the seed starting mix and give it a good watering so I like to do a three seed planting method just to help with that germination success put three seeds maybe four if you want and once they start sprouting and get to that two or three leaf stage you can either try to pluck them out and repot them somewhere else or just discard them and put them into the compost pile so I just pushed them down lightly covered them up make sure you mark what you planted before you move on to the next one because that's usually what I do is I forget when I'm filming that I need to mark what I did so I have a couple other family members that grow gardens that don't start a lot of their stuff from seeds so I hope that I can share these pepper plants with them once I get them going said I'll see well how well the germination goes and then decide if I want to just eliminate a couple of the seedlings or try to repot them and and gift them to other people so four peppers when you check out you know when you should be starting them it varies from anywhere from six weeks up to ten weeks some people prefer to plant them sooner I'm kind of a late planter right now I'm about eight weeks from my last frost date so these should be okay I like to keep them indoors as long as I can kind of like the tomatoes because they don't really like those cold snaps that we can have here in our cold climate and sometimes we get those late frosts or cold nights that peppers and tomatoes don't like so they can stay in these containers you know I can move them in and outside if I have to so that's why I I leave it till now because usually it'll probably be the first part of June before I put these into the garden now that the days are getting longer we're getting a lot more sunlight so if you have a sunny east-facing south-facing window you should be able to start these right in a window without having to use a grow light but if you do have grow lights and a heat mat that you got room on you know this is the best way to start them peppers like the warm soils so if you got one of this seedling heat mats which I recommend you invest in if you're going to be one to start plants indoors they aren't too expensive they last for many years and I will leave a link to them in the description box below so we have planted up three varieties of peppers all ready to go I'm just gonna give them a good drink right now and then they're ready to go under the grow lights so peppers take about 10 to 14 days to germinate so they're not near as quick as tomatoes so you just watch for them usually in about seven days you'll start to see some of these seedlings germinating but if you don't you know just know that it could take up to 14 days sometimes they're a little later push them down a little bit too far in the soil and lastly I recommend if you have some vermiculite just to put a sprinkling on the top that helps kind of retain the moisture on the surface it also helps to tear that damping off that can happen when the soil is you know moist and warm you can get that that green bacteria growing on the surface of your soil and that sometimes can kill off your seedlings so a little sprinkling of vermiculite on the top works best I try to avoid top watering too much when they're just small seedlings and do the bottom watering or just lightly spritz with a spritzer so these are ready to go under the grow lights or into a sunny window so that is my easy method on how to plant tomatoes and peppers from seed if you are a gardener who does this all the time I hope you find this method you know if you haven't tried it you will give it a try just using the one cup method this is your first time trying to grow something from seed I really encourage you to go out and check out all the varieties that are out there there are so many more to choose from then you will find in a greenhouse and give it a try even if it's a couple or if you're doing a whole tray like me doesn't matter very easy to get get that going so these are going to be going under grow lights that I have on a timer set for 16 hours on six off so it simulates sitting in a sunny window so either method should work for these like I said you can cover these up with a plastic dome or just a big sheet of plastic wrap just to kind of keep that moisture in I'll be doing some follow-up videos throughout the spring and summer on my tomatoes and peppers showing you how they're doing indoors and getting them ready for the outdoor garden season I'd love to hear in the comments what kind of tomatoes you like to grow and please remember to subscribe so you don't miss out on future videos coming to the channel thanks for watching