 Hi there and welcome to Little Garden on the Prairies. If this is your first time joining me on my channel, my name is Tracy and I am a small scale gardener living on the prairies in Saskatchewan Canada. So here on the prairies it is getting cold outside at night. We are having freezing temperatures and the outdoor gardening season has come to an end. But that doesn't mean that you can't still grow food all winter long and in my videos here for the next few months I'll be showing you how I grow food indoors using the cracky hydroponic method. So I have all sorts of different vegetables started here in my indoor growing space and in today's video we're gonna look specifically at my strawberries and peppers. I'm gonna show you how I've done some refreshing of the nutrients and treating some root rot with my strawberry plant here dealing with a bit of algae on some of my pepper seedlings and also give you a sneak preview of all the other things that I've got started here in my indoor garden and I've also just received a grow tent that I just got set up so I want to show you all the different vegetables that I want to try growing in there as well. So let's get started. Okay so check out this strawberry plant that I am growing hydroponically using the crack key method. This was a strawberry that I dug up from the garden this fall and I gave the roots a good washing. I set it up in a net cup with some nutrients and it is really taken off the roots are growing good. I'm starting to see a lot of blossoms all over the plant here. So I think it's time to give this a fresh batch of nutrients. I'm gonna show you how I'm gonna clean this container give the roots a cleaning and set it up with some fresh nutrients and hopefully see some strawberries soon. So these roots look fairly healthy they do have a bit of a brown tinge to them which sometimes is a sign of root rot and I'm not sure if it's just because these this plant was an outdoor plant growing in the dirt if that's why maybe I'm not seeing some really healthy white roots but I'm going to start off by giving these roots a little bath and some hydrogen peroxide. So I'm going to be using 3% hydrogen peroxide to give these roots a bit of a cleaning and disinfectant and help prevent any root rot in the future. So I've just poured a few tablespoons of peroxide into this dish and while I clean the container and refresh the nutrients I'm just going to set the roots gently into here and let them soak in the peroxide. So I'm going to be mixing up a 2 liter batch right into this container and I'm going to be using the Holland secret blend which is a three part formula for this and based on the measurements on the back I'm going to be using the amounts needed for plants that are going to be at the kind of the blooming stage so it's a little bit stronger formula than what these strawberries were originally in. So I'm just using the measurements on the back of the container making sure to stir in between each to blend it in really well. So I'm just going to remove the strawberry now from the hydrogen peroxide that it's been soaking in and give it a little rinse under the tap. Okay so we are ready to put the strawberry plant back into its container here. I'm just going to check the level of the water because you don't want to put the roots in too deep so I might have to remove some of the water out of here. So you want to make sure that some of the roots are in the solution but you also need air up here so that the plant can continue to breathe and develop some more air roots. So I'm going to take a little bit of this water out of the container so hopefully this plant is going to flourish and the nutrients that it's getting now will help it produce some fruit. For now we are just going to go put it back under the lights and I will show you the roots and see how they look after a few days. So I just want to do an update here on the strawberries about six days later since we changed out the solution in the water and give the roots a bit of a treatment with some peroxide. As you can see there's still lots of green healthy leaves. There's more blooming happening so that's a good sign. I am concerned though about the roots. They aren't looking very healthy. They kind of have that dark brown look that is usually a sign of root rot. But you know I can see the odd little white root coming through so maybe that's a good sign. We'll keep going here because like I say the plant looks really healthy and is shooting out some blossom. So I just wanted to show you the progress of some of my seedlings that I have started in Rockwall. These are my lettuces here and I got one tomato. They had some really good roots going. These ones I had sprouted under the grow lights from my arrow garden and they have some pretty good roots going here. So I just moved them into net cups so that they're kind of ready for before they get moved into their permanent containers. But I wanted to show you something here that I was just concerned about because these are my peppers. As you can see the Rockwall has got lots of green algae on it compared to this. These lettuces and tomatoes that do not. So I was trying to figure out why these got so green and I think the reason is I was not only just keeping these wet with plain water but I was also giving them the odd dose of some of my hydroponic solution water that has the nutrients in it just because I thought maybe it would just give it a little extra boost. And I think that nutrient water being exposed to air the LJ grows a little bit faster. So that's my conclusion as to why this is happening. So I think it's time to get these put into their net cups. I'm going to try and block out the Rockwall so that the algae will stop growing. I think that's just something these plants are competing with now is this algae that's forming on the Rockwall. And I'm not seeing you know a lot of healthy roots popping out yet. So I think before these start to weaken and die I'm going to try and save them by putting them in some net cups with some clay balls around them, block out the light, keep watering them with just plain water and they should be ready to go into their containers in the next week or two. Okay so I'm going to be using three inch net cups for my peppers and they will be going into a folders container like this. So I have these ready but for now I'm just going to get the peppers into each of these Rockwall containers and put some clay balls around them. So this is the the most healthiest looking one I think of my peppers. This is called the candy cane. It's a sweet pepper but as you can see there's lots of green algae and I'm not seeing any roots coming out yet which kind of concerns me because they should be shooting out a lot of roots by now. So I'll just put some clay balls in here, kind of give it a little bit of elevation, end up with a lot of clay balls on the floor down here. Okay so you can see there now that I've kind of covered up pretty much all the Rockwall so that there's not much light getting to it and the plant is still sticking out the top here. So I will be just keeping it in a container with a little bit of water at the bottom and still keeping it moist from the top and hopefully this will start shooting out some more roots in the next couple weeks. Okay so have all the peppers now in a container here with a little bit of water on the bottom and I will continue to keep them moistened from the top with a spray bottle here with just plain water. No more hydroponic nutrients for these plants right now and we'll check back in a few days and see if that's helped with their growth. As you can see here I've got some new stuff started. I have more lettuces growing here, some arugula, spinach and kale and I've also started some herbs here. I got oregano basil and some thyme. Okay so we will check back in a few days. I'll show you how everything's progressing. So here is the Mars Hydro grow tent that I've just received and got set up this week. It is a three by three size tent and the light that comes with this was a Mars Hydro T2000. I ordered the two together directly from the Mars Hydro website here in Canada and received it within less than a week. The cost to me for the two items together was $334 and that included shipping and taxes. So a bit of an investment but I think that it is going to give me a lot of fruit and vegetables over the next few years. So excited to get something growing in here this weekend. So it has been about 11 days now since we gave the strawberry a little refresh and treatment. It's still got a lot of green, lively looking leaves on it but I noticed a lot of the foliage that was on here. When we did the treatment it seems to have died off and I'm not seeing a whole lot of new root action right now but you know the plant's still alive. It's still shooting out blooms so I'll just keep you updated and let you know how the progress is going with my hydroponics strawberry plant. And here are my peppers five days after I've planted them up here in the net cups. They seem to be doing okay. Still pretty slow growth I'm seeing but they are alive. They're starting to shoot out more leaves looking for some signs of roots coming out the sides. Haven't seen any of those yet. So we'll just keep them under the lights here and keep them moist and hopefully they'll be ready to pot up in a couple more weeks. So stay tuned for that video. So I hope you enjoyed watching this video and found it informative. I would love if you'd continue to follow along with me on my channel to see how I grow food indoors. Hopefully you will be giving it a try as well. There's going to be some lettuce coming here soon. We've got lots of herbs coming. Tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, onions. Pretty much everything you can imagine growing indoors here so that you can have fresh salads, fresh veggies all winter long. So thank you for watching and we'll see you on the next video.