 Hi there and welcome to my channel. So I can hardly believe that it is almost time to start our indoor seedlings for our spring and summer garden this year. I have been so busy all winter growing food indoors such as lettuce, tomatoes, herbs, and cucumbers that the time to start seedlings indoors has kind of crept on me pretty fast. So I've been going through my calendar counting back from the last frost date and kind of getting things planned up for starting seeds indoors. So here in zone 3 Saskatchewan our last frost date is around May 15 according to the farmers Almanac. We usually plant our garden on the May long weekend which is about the third week of May. So for today we are going to talk about starting some flower seeds indoors and these are flower seeds that I have collected from plants that I grew last year. So a couple that I need to get going pretty soon because they should be started according to some of the directions I've read. They should be started 10 to 12 weeks before our last frost date. So we're into almost mid-February so you know sometime in before the end of this month I should have these started because I got other things planned in my schedule by the end of February early March. I want to get these started and hopefully they will sprout and from there find room under the grow lights. So it'll be interesting to see what kind of germination I get from these. These are a white snapdragon. I just really love having white flowers in my garden. So I had to do some searching to find these online and I got them from Stems Flower Farm in Ontario which is a wonderful website. If you haven't ever checked it out I found these Chantilly White Snapdragons. I started them from seed a little late last year because I ordered these a little late but I did get a nice little crop of them so I want to try and get some more. I collected as many seeds as I could myself and put them in these packages. I also purchased white petunias from the greenhouse last summer and had them planted throughout my flower bed. I want to get a quite a few more going this year. I had a hard time finding white petunias in the greenhouses. So I got a whole bunch of those seeds collected. They're very tiny. I also took petunia seeds from Pink Petunias. I purchased some coral snapdragon from the greenhouse. They were beautiful color so I collected a bunch of those seeds and then at the end of the fall when I was getting really lazy I just ripped some of my stems from my petunias. A couple different colors. I think these are blue or purple petunia. Just threw them into these bags and we're going to see if we can get any seeds out of these now. So I plan on starting these seeds of course using some seed starting mix. I'm going to use these loaf pans that I purchased from the dollar store. You can get a three-pack for $1.25 and I want to use them because I'm not really sure how good these seeds are if they're going to mate. I don't want to bother planting them in individual cells right now. So my plan is to spread some soil in here. Sprinkle the seeds and see what kind of germination we get and from there I will transplant them into larger seed cells. First of all we'll see if we can find some seeds in these petunia branches that I cut last fall. Okay so we're going to see what kind of seeds we got if any from these branches that I ripped from my petunia plants. It's a little tricky here. I'm going to just take every little crumb that I'm getting out of this bag to start with. So I just grabbed the marker out of the pot so I knew what color it was. These are Easy Wave Blue. I think some of these little tiny black things here could be seeds. I'm trying to look to see if I can find any pods on my branches that I took. So I just want to show you what petunia seeds look like just so you know what I'm trying to find here. You can see that this is pink petunia seeds that I collected from the pods found on the petunia plants. Super, super tiny. Okay so looking through the branches of this one petunia that I took off the plant in the fall I'm not confident if I actually got any seeds. Can't really find any pods to break open that usually are full of seeds and usually quite easy to identify but now that it's dried out it's a little bit harder. I did break apart this one. I think you know there could be some seeds there. So what I think I'll do is I'll just kind of sift this out a little bit, get rid of the bigger pieces. We'll just spread it on to some seed starting soil and keep it moist and see what happens in the next couple weeks. I'm about 99% confident that I'm seeing little tiny seeds rolling around here on this paper. So hopefully all this effort is worth it. Okay so I'm only filling up these containers about halfway with the seed starting mix that will give about two inches or so of growth space. I don't intend on keeping the seedlings in here very long if we have good germination. I will be probably potting them up into different seed cells after a couple weeks. Something that I always do with my any kind of potting soil that I bring into the home. What I usually do is boil water and use that as a way to first of all moisten the soil and give it some extra moisture and it also just is a way of keeping any fungus gnats or fungus eggs that just might be in the soil. Usually this is with good quality soil. That isn't an issue but I find it's just a little extra way of making sure that you don't be bringing any extra bugs into your house because once you get those fungus gnats going in your indoor growing they're a real pain to try and get rid of. So we're gonna get six of these ready and start sprinkling around the seeds. So one of the benefits of collecting your own seeds from your flowers of course is that you have a lot extra seeds to work with compared to what you get when you buy a little package like this from the seed store. I can't recall what this is, what this costs, but I know petunias that you buy like the McKenzie brand, but petunias are usually $3.99 and you probably don't even get that many seeds in a packet. So if you can collect your own seeds from your flowers every year if you're interested in trying to start them indoors yourself it is much cheaper collecting your own seeds. So we're going to start with the white snapdragon ones here, see what they look like. As you can see I got a lot of extra materials in there but there's a lot of seeds there as well. So I have a lot to work with and I've just taken Popsicle sticks to write the names of these seeds on here. So I'll try to spread them as thinly as possible. It's kind of like planting carrot seeds, it's radishes, it's pretty hard to keep them thin. I'll just gently sprinkle them over the tops here. I think I'll have way more seeds than I will actually need. So I think that is enough of those seeds right now. I'm just going to put a very light layer of dirt on here and then we'll give it a good spray with a spray bottle. So these flowers seeds here that we collected from those dried branches that I just saved from a couple plants last fall are kind of the ones that I'm most curious to see how they turn out. This is the wave purple and I'll just show you from all that sifting we did. I'm very confident that there is some seeds in there. I'm just gonna generously sprinkle this all around here. Try to get what looks like seeds to tell but some of it just feels like powder but I said I'm gonna give it a good sprinkling and we'll see what happens. Hopefully I didn't bring any weed seeds into my indoor growing but sometimes that happens. So I am gonna be putting these into a grow box that I made myself. It's kind of a DIY project that I did and I have a video on my channel. I'll put the link up at the top of the screen so if it's something you want to try making for yourself it's a great way to start seeds. I actually used it to start my petunias and some other flowers last spring and it works really good. So the other one is called an easy wave blue. So I think germination for petunias is about 10 to 14 days and germination for snap dragons is 7 to 14 days. So we will check back and I will keep you posted on how things are going. Okay so this is the grow box that I'm gonna be using to sprout these flowers today and as you can see here I got all six of the containers inside this grow box that I made. This is simply a large rubber made tub that I've lined with tinfoil. I've used a clamp light here that I've cut into the lid. See here and this is a $4 dollar dollar store grow light that I purchased from Dollarama. So I'll be just turning on the light. You can see it's got a nice pink color. I have it plugged into my power bar here that's connected to a timer so this is going to run on the same time as all my other indoor grow lights here where they're 16 hours on and 8 hours off. So I will just continue to spritz these, keep them moist over the next week to 10 days and when I bring you back hopefully I will have some sprouting action to show you. Okay so it has been eight days. These seedlings have been in the grow box here. Let's check out and see what kind of progress we have. So as you can see here we got lots of little seedlings popping up. The petunias, snap dragons, the white sap snap dragons. The ones that I was really curious about to see if they were going to sprout were these two that I gathered in the fall just some branches from some dead petunia plants and as you can see we got a whole pile of them coming up here. Over here I didn't think there was any but now I can see definitely some action going on there and lots of pink petunias. So I hope you will subscribe and keep watching for more videos on how to start your seeds indoors, getting ready for your outdoor garden season. Thanks for watching.