 Hi there and welcome to Getting Clean on the Prairies. Today is pepper planting time for us here in Zone 3. We are reaching the third week of March, we're at about the 21st of March. So we are nine weeks away from our last frost date. So this is about the time where I start planting up my peppers and tomatoes. So I have done a variety of peppers today and I want to share with you how I did it, how I planted them up and also talk about where I got these seeds from. These are all seeds that I received through the Canadian Seed Exchange Challenge from some of my gardening friends across Canada. So I'm very excited to try them out. I had probably ten or so different types of peppers and I've narrowed it down to six and I wanted to try each of these peppers that I received from my gardening friends. So I'm going to try them and I'm going to kind of walk you through what each one of them is and how I planted them up. So let's get started. So I have here some craigs, jalapeno peppers and those came from my friend Sherry. She's got a gardening channel on YouTube called Gardening in the North. She's in Ontario. So we're going to try those out today and I will put the link to Sherry's YouTube channel down below so you can check out her channel. So this is one of them that I'm going to be trying. Jalapenos are always great to have for making salsas. So I'm hoping that these turn out for me. Another hot pepper that I'm going to try is called the Portugal pepper and this came from Elizabeth. She also has a gardening channel called Elizabeth's Adventures. She lives in B.C. I believe right on the coast maybe around Animo I'm thinking and she has a great website so please check it out. And these are hot chili peppers. I'm kind of excited about trying those because I like to make hot pepper flakes for cooking. I hope these turn out and I can try them. So Portugal peppers. And then I received a couple sweet pepper seeds from Auxenca Strug. She was part of the Canadian Seed Exchange Challenge. She doesn't have a YouTube channel that I know of. If you do and if you're watching or if anybody knows please share it in the comments below. But she sent me a couple different sweet peppers that I'm excited about. I'm more of a sweet pepper kind of girl. I like to cook with sweet peppers. I like to put them in my salad. So these are tomato peppers, the sweet version, and lesia sweet peppers. So I'm going to try these two sweet peppers. And the couple that I just want to do a shout out to is Hickory Croft Farm. They're the couple that actually started the Seed Exchange Challenge in Canada along with Lori from Lori's World. So those are two more channels to please check out. Steve and Chris sent me a variety of seeds and one of them was Tali's Sweet Italian Frying Pepper. And that sounds so delicious to me. Again, I like sweet peppers and just the idea of frying them up and eating them sounds really good. So these are another pepper that I'll be trying. And the last one here is actually didn't come through the Seed Exchange but I purchased it from a local seed company that you've probably seen on several of my videos because I love buying their seeds. They are a local family that has been collecting and saving heirloom seeds for generations and they have all sorts of wild flowers and they've expanded into heirloom vegetables and these are Aurora peppers. So these are a medium hot pepper and they change color. It says here from pink to purple to orange and red as they ripen. So they'll sound very pretty and you can see on the package. They look quite nice and they also could be used as a house plant. So I'm going to try and get a few of these going and try them outside and then maybe keep one indoors as a house plant as well or over the winter. So those are my six different peppers that I am going to be starting from seed indoors. I don't want to put these in the ground when there's still risk of frost even though our last frost date is said to be mid-May. We quite often get cold nights and frost right up until the 1st of June. For my tomatoes and peppers I will probably keep them indoors until the ground is warm and the nights are warm and most of these are 65 to 75 days of maturity so that would take us into early to mid-August and these peppers will be ripe. As long as we don't get early frost and the conditions are right I'm hoping that some of these will be able to stay in the garden and ripen to all the different pretty colors that they can. I used a mixture of seed-starting mix and some vermiculite and perilite. I sterilized the soil with boiling water prior to potting it up just to make sure I don't get any fungus gnats or there's no danger of fungus gnats in the soil. I'll be using 3-inch pots to start these and putting three seeds in each to see just to hopefully see that at least one germinates. Hopefully I can keep them in these pots right up until they go outside. I'll find to just keep one plant in each pot. I will thin them out as they germinate and grow. I'll be putting them on a heat mat to start with my lights just set about a couple inches away from the top. I put a light layer of vermiculite on the soil to keep it from damping off and also to help prevent the fungus gnats. I've had a bit of an infestation of them in my ornamental grasses and hopefully they don't spread into my other seedlings. So I hope you enjoyed watching how I started my peppers from seed indoors and if you haven't already done so please subscribe and hit that notification bell so that you don't miss out on the next video. Thanks for watching!