 Hi there and welcome to the channel. So today I am going to get some more seed started, setting them up for cracky hydroponic method. And I thought that I would try using this seed starting method that I just come up with myself. This here is a Rubbermaid container. It is a 3 liter size or 11 liter size, 3 gallon size, I guess, that I normally use for growing lettuce hydroponically. I fill it full of nutrient water and grow lettuce in this. It works really great. I actually have three of these Rubbermaid tubs set up like this with the holes cut that fit either the two inch or the three inch net pots. So I thought it'd be good to have use this to start several of my seeds at one time under the grow lights. Start them right in the net cups that I'm going to be eventually transferring to my favorite containers, the Folgers coffee containers. So once I have these seeds well established and they got a good root system going, I will just transfer them right into a container like this full of nutrient water. Put them in the grow tent and you're good to go. So to start off with, all I've done here is filled my Rubbermaid tub with just plain water. This is water that I've had sitting in a jug for several days. I usually because I'm using tap water that's treated, I usually fill up a couple jugs and let the water sit so that all that treatment in the water kind of settles and dissipates. And now I filled it up far enough so the water level is touching the bottom of these net cups. Then I'm going to just start by filling them up with the clay balls. So these hydro ton clay balls are great to have for hydroponic growing. I got a large bag of these about four years ago and every year I just reuse them over and over. After the plant dies I just give these a good rinse and reuse them over and over. So they're a one-time investment that'll bring you years and years of hydroponic growing. I plan to get growing today are a couple more tomatoes. I'm trying to get some larger sized tomatoes going in my grow tent. So this is a brandy wine and this one is called Prairie Pride. This one I know for sure is a more of a determinate bush variety so it shouldn't get too big. This one I'm not too sure but I have seen others growing it indoors. So I'm going to try those two tomatoes. I'm going to try King of the North pepper. These create nice big green peppers which is something I use a lot of so I'm hoping I can get a nice pepper plant going. And I already have one Diva cucumber started in my grow tent and going to try starting another one. Kind of like succession planting with my cucumbers as well. That still leaves me with one container here that I haven't decided whether. I'd always like to try something a little different little outside of the box for growing indoors. I've had success with strawberries and I can find some seeds. I might try a strawberry plant again. If not I might try a cantaloupe. See how that fits in my grow tent. So normally in the past I've always used some of this rock wool as part of my seed starting method. I would put it inside one of these net cups. They're usually are saturated in water. You can put the seed in the little hole and they would make a great medium for starting plants and then the plant can just all the roots will just grow through the rock well and find their way to the nutrient water and it works good. Thing is about these these aren't you know very environmentally friendly. They are not compostable. Some people don't really care for these because they are kind of almost like insulation. Same kind of material. So I'm trying to get away from using these and trying different methods. I've got a small supply of these left so I may use them down the road but for today I'm going to try just using my clay balls and just some little pieces of hemp. I've got this hemp mat here that I use for sprouting microgreens on. I just trimmed a little bit of it away. I'm just going to put a little bit of each of this into my containers here. That's where the seeds are going to go. It'll hopefully retain some of the moisture and kind of be a good medium for the little seeds to sprout and take off. So we'll see how that works. Something else I've thought about too is pieces of cheesecloth, you know old cotton. Something that's compostable is kind of what I'm shooting for here that a seed can easily sprout in. Another great thing about these hydrogen clay balls is that they are very porous and they also retain moisture so I'm just going to kind of get them all wetted down before we put our seeds in here and they should be able to keep wicking up water from down below here. I want to make sure that I am blocking out all the light that could be getting through these net cups so just topping up with some more clay balls to help block out that light. Kind of bury this piece of hemp down below a little bit. Get it secured here in the middle. Okay so I just finished putting all my seeds in. Thought I had the record button going but I did not so sorry about that but just to kind of recap what I've done here I have planted up one of these diva cucumbers. I've got a couple King of the North green peppers in here. I got my two tomatoes, the prairie pride and the brandy wine over here. I just need to make sure I mark them so I can keep track of my two tomatoes that I got going here. I couldn't find any strawberry seeds in my stash so we are going to try the Minnesota Midget Cantaloupe. Let's see how this works indoors. I've had a bit of success growing these outside during the year but I've never tried a melon indoors. I'm not sure it's going to have to be something to kind of keep under control and you know maybe prune it down so that you'd only get a few plants or a few pieces of fruit growing. I'm not sure how it's going to work but we're going to give it a try and that'll be kind of my fun test for this winter. So if anybody has any other ideas of or different ways of starting their seeds for the hydroponic method other than you know using rock wool. I have tried coconut core as kind of the medium in these clay pots but I found that it was really messy. The dirt kind of trickles through the net pots into my water so if anybody has any other ideas of seed starting for hydroponics I'd love to hear it in the comments. And if you're enjoying this content and want to see more of it please don't forget to hit that subscribe button. So I'm just going to use these little plastic shot glasses as kind of a humidity dome just to try and keep some of that moisture in there until these get sprouted. Okay so we're ready to put this under the lights. So for now I'm just going to set them under these two LED lights that I have set up on my shelving system here. Once these get sprouted and I transfer the plants into the containers in the Krakki method they will go inside my grow tent. But for now this is just a good place to keep an eye on them. I will be running these lights for the same as what I have up top here for some of my other plants. They're on a timer 16 hours on, 8 hours off. For now these really don't need any light to germinate so I'm just going to leave them for a few days and once I see those seeds starting to germinate I will get these lights on the timer system as well. Another tip is to try to make sure your clay balls and your piece of medium there that these are sprouting in. For me it's this piece of hemp is staying moist and doesn't dry out. I'll just be kind of spritzing it with a spritzer but it should also stay moist by wicking up from the water below. So we will check back here in a week or so and see how these are doing. Okay so I pulled it out from under the lights here and I wanted to show you how things are looking about 12-13 days later since I started these in the little pieces of hemp. And as you can see I've got a really good start here with the tomatoes. These are my brandy wine tomatoes. I think I threw about four little seeds in there and all of them have sprouted. I've got three of them there so I'm going to have to cut out two and just keep one. Not seeing any roots coming out the bottom. Oh yeah so you can see here there's already a root reaching for the water. So which one that is of these three I don't know. So I might just leave it for a while let it get a little more established before I cut out two of these. The prairie pride tomato also. Two little seeds have sprouted and as you can see there's roots coming out the bottom so that's great. I had wondered about this one. I think this is the pepper plant and it took a while but it did sprout and it looks like it's going to be okay. I don't see any roots coming out the bottom yet. So but the one cantaloupe seed that I put in here did not sprout so I just tried putting a couple more in there and I'm keeping it moist and with the cucumber one it did sprout but then it kind of just fizzled out and died so I'm not sure if it just didn't really like sprouting in that medium of the hemp or what the problem was there but I've also tossed a couple more of the cucumber seeds in here now and what I think I will do just to kind of give it a little more coverage that maybe will help it is I was going to just try sprinkling some of this vermiculite on the top just to kind of give it a a little bit of a coating kind of like what soil would do. Keep it moist. Again this is just trial and error. I don't know if it'll work but I just thought it might sprout a little bit better if it's got a little better coverage. So I'm going to just keep these under the grow lights on my shelf here for another couple weeks until I get a really good root system going and then I will be setting them up in the crack key method in these Folgers containers. So I'm going to put these back under these grow lights here on the shelf and before I end this video just take you to my grow tent and show you how the cucumber and tomatoes doing in there right now. So things are looking pretty empty still in my grow tent here. I've got my diva cucumber going and this is my tomato that I took a cutting from out of the garden. This is the sun gold cherry tomato. It's an indeterminate variety and as you can see it's growing and growing and I've got a nice big pile of tomatoes here at the bottom and lots more blooms coming all over. So it's doing pretty good. The diva cucumber however I'm concerned because I keep having this issue with the leaves kind of just drying up. As you can see they just crumble and I just can't figure out what kind of a deficiency or what the cause of this is. It's just this particular strand of cucumber but I just kind of keep removing these older dead leaves and new ones keep coming and I can see that pretty soon I should start seeing some some blooms and hopefully it'll start vining up this trellis here. So again if anybody has any comments on why what I might be doing wrong with my cucumbers I'd love to hear about it. I've refreshed the nutrient waters with a full new batch. I got my three-part nutrients in there plus some calcium and magnesium so we'll help to see if we can fix the problem and if we can have success getting cucumbers. So I hope you enjoyed watching my video on how I grow food indoors using the cracky hydroponic method. Please remember to like, leave a comment, hit subscribe and we'll see you on the next video.