 Hi there and welcome to Little Garden on the Prairies. So I'm very excited because this is the first outdoor video of 2022 that I'll be sharing with you today and it is a beautiful sunny day. So if you've seen on my previous videos I have a lot of indoor starts going on in my basement and in the garage and we are still a few weeks away from that last frost date so none of that can come outdoors yet but there are a lot of things that can be planted outdoors directly into the ground before last frost date. So in this video I'm going to show you some of the seeds that I'm going to be direct sowing into containers. So before we get to the planting I just want to take you on a quick tour of the garden to show you the beautiful blue skies we're having here today on the Saskatchewan Prairies and if you have a look here at my garden it looks pretty disastrous right now. I am in the process of converting my two raised garden beds to containers. I have access to many of these wonderful 30 gallon tubs. They are mineral tubs that we get from our cattle. Once they've licked them clean we wash them out and they are food grade safe and they make such a good container for growing. And it's just a lot easier than crawling around on your hands and knees. I'm kind of getting to the point in my life where I don't really want to be doing that a whole lot. I'll probably do another video here next week kind of giving you more details on how that's all going to go and how I'm going to fill up these containers. The soil in these raised garden beds you know is just several layers of wonderful materials that I've added over the last few years. Leaves, wood chips, compost and I didn't want to just throw it away so I'm digging it all out and going to use it to fill these tubs. So I'll go over some of the seeds that I'm going to be directly sowing today plus give you a list of other seeds that you can plant early. These are all cool weather crops that require soil temperature to be somewhere around that 10 degrees to 15 degrees Celsius. And when I came out yesterday afternoon and did a temperature check the soil seems to be about you know 17-18 degrees on the surface and down below it was you know around that 10 degrees mark. We had some super windy days this past week where the wind was gushing to 70 kilometers an hour. Those two days were just horrible you didn't even want to be outside and a system like this would never hold up in any kind of wind like that. So I don't think it's worth fighting with I'm just going to remove all this. I think the soil is nice and warm so we can get planting. So before I get planting my lettuces here I'm just going to put in a all-purpose fertilizer and add that into the soil here. So this is just a 4-4-4 general all-purpose type fertilizer that I usually add into my containers. So I've taken some fresh soil from my raised garden beds that is you know really nice organic soil. It's got lots of material in it some broken down leaves and compost that I've added and some wood chips. So I think it'll be a nice soil for this lettuce and I plan to do succession planting with my lettuces and kale and spinach. So I plan I'm just going to be planting up on the back half of these containers. So here the sun rises over there and it comes across my garden. So these will have sun shining on them for probably you know 16 hours a day throughout the spring and early summer for sure. So if I plant this first round here in the back these will grow up in about three weeks. I'll do another planting in the front here so these won't you know be shading out the new seedlings when they come through. So I just add a little handful of the fertilizer here try not to let it all blow away work it into the soil. I'll work it into the whole container. I don't really follow any kind of particular measurement just a little sprinkle. So something that I try to follow is the square foot gardening method when I'm planting and it just helps kind of show you the the proper spacing of your seeds depending on what you're planting. It is a bit of a challenge to use this square space seed spacing thing in a round container but I'll just kind of show you how I do it. So for lettuces and kale and spinach you use this spacing of the red circle so that kind of shows you. So you can just press down just to kind of mark where you're going to be pushing where you're going to be planting the seeds and I believe these in a square foot there is 16 spaces for lettuce or kales and then from there I just kind of go outwards following this pattern a little bit so that I can plant a few more to each side just kind of eyeballing it and then from there you should have all your holes marked where you want to place your seeds. This is covering a little more than half of my container but that's okay. So in this one I'm going to be planting kale so I try to just do one per hole. You can you know just sprinkle it around I've done that before you know you end up with a very thick crop that needs to be thinned out. I'm going to try this and see how it looks once it starts coming. You could even go a little bit closer to the edge here and throw in a few more but this way you kind of got a nice general spacing of your seeds. Another reason why I'm moving to container gardening is my little doggie here that you see in the background is already been digging in the garden burying some treasures so I'm hoping if I switch to the containers that that won't be such a problem. Then after getting the seeds in just give it a good generous water and ready to move on to the next container. So the next thing I'm going to plant up here today is some radishes and some spring onions. So I have two kinds of onions that I'm going to try today and one's kind of like a purple and this guy is going to really give me grief while I do this. Okay so I just relocated these containers so I can do some videoing with hopefully without the dog sticking his nose in things and disrupting it. So for onions these are like a spring green onion that I like to grow in containers and something this size works perfectly and it's good because you can move it around the garden and make sure it's in a sunny spot. And for radishes pretty much any container goes as well. This isn't very big but because I can you know plant about 16 in here today and then find another little container in a week and start some more you can kind of just grow radishes anywhere every couple weeks so that you always have some. I find that if I grow too many at one time they you know they grow so fast that I can't keep up with them so little containers like this work great. So I did the same I add just a little sprinkling of the all-purpose fertilizer into the soil here worked it up a little bit so it's nice and loose and I'm going to do some French breakfast today. And according to the square foot method you should do kind of the same spacing you do with lettuce where you have 16 per square foot but I'm kind of just going to eyeball it. I'm not too worried about them being too close together it's easy to thin out later or just let them grow sometimes they will grow together and just push each other aside and still you know you can still harvest them and get a pretty good crop that way. So I just push my seeds down with my finger wherever I see them I think I can shove a few more in here and then just gently pat it down. So hopefully it's not going to be issue with my dog this year getting into these small containers I will see how it goes and again just give it a good watering and then just find a nice sunny location for it and leave it in your garden. So radishes are one of the fastest growing garden vegetables these should be ready to harvest within 25 to 30 days. And for these onions I'm just going to run a line down the middle here and plant both of them into this container. Again green onions are another type that you can succession plant throughout the summer. Find a container find a corner somewhere in your garden where you could throw in some more of these. You can plant them all summer long. I just pulled these out I did grow some of these indoors hydroponically this winter and I see that I hardly have any seeds left so these are only going to take up a quarter of this container. I just lightly cover them work them in don't bury them too deep. So I got lots of these ones these are more of a purple type of a green onion these are called the Rosa Lunga de Friends. Another seed that you can direct so before the last frost are peas. So peas are cool weather crops that love being planted in nice cool soil in early spring. So I have got these four cloth grow bags designated for my peas here. We have an old remnants of a rabbit cage here that we left one side up that's chicken wire so we thought it would make a good trellising system for peas so that's why I have them up against here. They get lots of sunlight here as well. So I'm going to be planting two types of peas today. This is a burp fienna early so it's a potted pea that you have to shell to eat and these are a sugar pod so they have the edible type pod and these are called Oregon sugar pod so I'm going to set up these two in these containers. So I usually push my peas down about one inch into the soil spread them out about you know two inches or so apart using the square foot method they say about six per square foot so we'll kind of follow that here. I guess they I just push it down so it goes about you know a good inch into the soil. So peas are have very a very shallow root system so they're best to direct so you can try starting peas indoors but they don't transplant very well like I said they have a shallow root system and they don't really like to be disturbed so this is the best way to do it once your soil is warm. So I got about so I think 14 in here and I'm just going to cover them up and these ones growing on this side will hopefully attach to this chicken wire and then I will also probably stick a tomato cage in here as well for them to grow up as well in the front parts. If you're enjoying this video and find value in the information I share on my channel you can help support me by clicking on the thanks button below and make a small contribution to the channel. So one final step after planting your seeds you should always use some kind of mulch on top of the surface just to keep that moisture in and protect it from the hot sun keep it from drying out too fast. I have a an abundance of old straw so that's what I'm going to be using on my planters today. You can also use dried leaves you know kind of ground up dried leaves makes a great mulch if you have some wood chips grass clippings anything like that will make a good mulch on top of your containers. So I hope you found this video helpful and that you will start doing some direct sowing outdoors if you're still waiting for that final frost date to pass. There's a lot of things that you can be planting outdoors right now so please leave comments below hit that like button if you haven't already done so hit subscribe so you don't miss out on any more videos coming to my channel thanks for watching