 Hi there and welcome to Little Garden on the Prairies and welcome to 2022. If you are new to my channel, my name is Tracy and my husband Preston and I are empty nesters slash full-time workers slash farmers living on the prairies in Saskatchewan, Canada. So we are now starting another new year and like most of us, I have all sorts of goals, ideas and projects I hope to conquer in the next 12 months and I want to share these things with you on my channel. I am also excited to be participating in the Canadian Seed Challenge 2022 which I will talk about later on in this video. So if you've been following along with me on my channel you will know that right now I have been doing a lot of indoor gardening. Here on the prairies our winters are very very cold so being able to continue growing fresh vegetables inside my home is a wonderful hobby that I so enjoy and seeing all that beautiful green living vegetation, being able to eat fresh salads and cook with my own herbs is so satisfying. I have all sorts of tutorial videos on my channel on how you can grow your own food indoors using the crack key hydroponic method. So be sure to check them out. Soon it will be time to start my winter sewing for the year. Winter sewing is a technique for planting seeds outdoors in the winter to give them a head start in spring. So using milk jugs or other similar type containers I plant up flowers, herbs and vegetables, place them outside in the snow and these seeds lie dormant all winter and are ready to sprout the first chance they get in the spring. So this is a great method if you don't have much indoor space to start your seedlings for your garden it involves very little maintenance and hopefully in late spring you will have some healthy naturally hardened off seedlings that you can add to your garden. So again I have several videos on this method on my channel and we'll be making more starting in February so stay tuned for those. And of course I'm also looking forward to starting some seedlings in my indoor space for my outdoor garden this spring. I like starting tomatoes, peppers, a variety of different annual flowers, indoors and usually I plant way too many but that's okay because I can always give them to somebody else for their garden. And here on the prairies we often get hit with late frost that kind of catch us off guard and sometimes you'll lose some of those plants that you've put into the garden a little too early. So I like to keep some spares in my garage or garden shed just to as a backup to replace some of those seedlings that we may lose. I'm also hoping to create a self watering irrigation system for my raised garden beds and containers. I've been watching a lot of YouTube videos on how to create your own DIY irrigation system so hopefully that will be a spring project that I will be able to share with you on my channel. Something I'm wanting to add to my channel this year is my journey towards decluttering and organizing my home. As I mentioned at the beginning my husband and I are empty nesters living in a fairly large home and I have some very nasty spaces full of stuff that I need to purge. There are a lot of things that I'm holding on to for sentimental reasons. A lot of stuff came from my parents home after my mother passed away and dad sold the house and I'm working on preparing myself mentally to get rid of things I do not need and things I do not want to burden my three daughters to deal with after I'm gone. So keep watching for those videos coming soon to my channel. Okay so let's get on to the Canadian Seed Challenge 2022. I want to do a big shout out to Stephanie and Chris from the YouTube channel Hickory Croft Farm. They are a couple from Ontario that also have a YouTube channel. I will leave the link to their channel below and they kind of got this going this year and so I just want to thank them for doing that. So I didn't do a very good job of collecting seeds myself from my garden. I collected a lot of flowers from petunias and pansies and stuff like that that are very easy to collect but as far as collecting vegetable seeds I only had done a couple peppers. So if anybody's interested I have a lot of seeds from Sweet Italian Peppers and again thank you to Stephanie and Chris because they sent me these seeds last year in our seed challenge and I planted some of these outdoors. They were turned out really good and got a lot of seeds collected from them. The other seed that I have a large abundance of is a paprika pepper. You can see them here. They're yellow in the picture but when I grew them last year I let them ripen to a beautiful red and I dried them and ground them up and made you know a nice jar of paprika pepper spice from my spice cupboard out of them. Collected tons of seeds so if you're interested in paprika peppers you can grow them outside. I grew them last winter indoors as well. So I do however have a large collection of heirloom vegetable seeds that I have purchased from a local company called the Blazing Star Wildflower Seed Company. So this is a family owned and operated seed company based in Aberdeen, Saskatchewan which is just a small little town not too far from where I live and they offer prairie wildflower seeds, wildflower mixes for pollinators and heirloom vegetable seeds so I will leave a link to their website below but I have a lot of seeds that I have purchased from this company that I would love to share if anyone is interested. So I think some of the people on the challenge have mentioned interest in a cucumber melon so I do have some of those. I tried growing these last year but I don't think they turned out very well. I put them in with my regular cucumbers and they kind of got choked out so I'm going to try them again this spring probably in a container to see if I can get some cucumbers going. This is another one that I'm hoping I have success with next year. I have planted three or four different types of squashes last year and didn't have much luck with them producing fruit. I don't know why but I'm going to try again. This is called the Burgess Squash and it is got a taste kind of similar to a sweet potato so I think that would be a really cool squash to try and grow. So I do have some spare seeds of the Burgess Squash if anybody's interested. Aurora pepper. I have one growing here in the back. It is a nice house plant and it produces these small little peppers that turn different colors are very pretty. They are kind of a medium medium hot pepper so if anybody interested got some of those and I also have a variety of tomatoes that I could spare some seeds. One is called the dwarf wild fred, a Fargo yellow pear and black cherry. So if anybody's interested in those just let me know in the comments below. The Minnesota Midget Muskmelon something that I could spare a few seeds for if anybody wants to try them. So as far as my wish list for 2022 I don't have a very big one but I am specifically looking for a couple kinds of tomatoes that I really like and that's just a beef steak type tomato. I didn't plant any of those large tomatoes last year for some reason. I really missed having a nice big slicing tomato for sandwiches so if anybody has some extra beef steak tomato seeds I would love some. I'm also looking for a small-sized cherry tomato known as the Sun Gold Cherry Tomato. I planted some two years ago and they were so good they're so sweet and so abundant and last year I didn't get a chance to look for the seeds and didn't get any but if so if anybody has Sun Gold Cherry Tomato seeds I would like some. Another thing that I really like to try out that I've seen a lot of videos on and I think would be hearty and easy to grow here in zone 3 which is what I live in here on the prairies and that is ground cherries. So I've seen other Canadians planting them and they sound like they be really cool and delicious to grow so ground cherry seeds anybody got some let me know. And I'm also looking for a very specific cucumber seeds. They are called the Parsnokarpic cucumbers. So those are the cucumbers that only produce female flowers so you don't really need to pollinate them and I'm looking for them specifically to use in my indoor garden so that I can grow cucumbers in the winter and not have to worry about pollination indoors and I've been trying a diva strand of seed this winter not not the best success so I'm just looking for some other kinds that I've researched some of them include Socrates, sweet success, Tyria, Katrina or Piccolini. So if anybody happens to have some of those seeds or can direct me to a company in Canada that maybe I can find those seeds online and purchase I would love if you would let me know in the comments. Okay so that wraps up my first video of 2022. I have got just a head full of ideas and projects and things I want to try new things to grow new techniques to try in the garden and of course a whole list of projects that I'd like to complete in my house and in my yard. So I hope you will continue to follow along with me on my channel and check out some of my other videos. I want to wish everyone a happy new year in 2022 and we will see you on the next video.