 Hi there and happy first day of spring. If this is your first time joining me on my channel, my name is Tracy and I live on the Prairies in Saskatchewan, Canada. And it is still quite snowy here. The temperature today is two or three degrees above freezing, so things are melting. But we still have a good six weeks until our last frost date and lots of cold nights still yet to come. So it's still a good time to do some winter sewing here where I live. I've been watching a lot of videos of people living in much warmer growing zones than I do and seeing them already having sprouting action in their winter sewing jugs and getting them actually ready to plant into the ground. But here we still have a ways to go and still lots of time to do some more winter sewing. So I'm going to be planting up some more things today. Something that I was thinking about when I look at some of the results from previous years is to maybe try changing up the soil mixture that I'm using in my jugs. I always recommend that you use a good organic potting soil in your winter sewing, which I still will be doing. But I thought maybe because sometimes the soil in here in the spring looks very compacted and kind of hard, that maybe it needs a little more aeration and some moisture retention ingredients added to it. So I'm going to mix up a mixture of soil that's similar to what I would use in my container gardening or in my raised garden beds. And that consists of just potting soil, some coconut core, or peat moss, either of those works, and some perlite. So I'm just going to show you how I'm going to mix it up and we'll get some more jugs planted. So I'm not going to be using any specific measurements as far as how much of each of these things I'm putting into my mix. I had about a half a bag of this organic potting soil left, which I've dumped into this tub here. And I've bought in a few of these little blocks of coconut core. So this is from Plant Best, Beats Pete Mini. So once you've expanded that block, this is what you end up with in quantity, apparently it's about four quarts or almost four liters of coconut core. So I'm just going to dump that in as well. So the coconut core will help with aeration and it's good for moisture retention. And the perlite also helps with aeration and drainage as well. So just going to dump probably about three or four cups of the perlite in here. I like to have a big tub mixed up of my starting soil out here in the garage. Once I'm done winter sowing, I will be potting up various things that I'll start here in the garage in the window like different flowers and probably maybe some cucumbers, corn, whatever it kind of feel like trying to start indoors just to get a jump start. So this is just a close up of what the soil is going to look like. It's nice and airy and light. I'm going to add some more water to it and make sure that the jugs are well saturated before they go outside. So I'll start off by adding a good couple inches here of water in the bottom of this tray and let the jugs wick up a whole bunch of water here from the bottom and then we can start putting our seeds in them. So here's what I'm going to be planting up today. I'm going to be doing a red bunching onion, the Rosa Lunga de Ferenze. So that is like a bunching onion but it's got that purple tinge to it. I had good luck with chamomile winter sowing in the past but I can't seem to keep it alive over the winter because our winters are so cold. So I'm going to start up some more of that. Another herb that does not winter well here in Saskatchewan is peppermint but it does grow good once you know every year if you get it started indoors. So I will try that in winter sowing. I got another green onion. I love using green onions and fresh onions and salads all through the summer so these bunching ones are good ones to have planted up and ready. And I got a couple ones that say that they need to be stratified or go through stratification so I thought winter sowing is a good way of naturally doing that to these seeds. So I'm going to be trying some borage which is a good pollinator type plant to have in the garden. These are some seeds that a friend gave to me that are poppies. They're called the Hen and Chicks Poppy and poppies are another good seed that needs to be stratified. So this is what we're going to plant up today. So if you've watched my other videos I always like to mark my jugs on the inside as well as on the outside just in case the writing on the outside falls off and mark it before I put the seeds in. You see I always like to reuse spoons or knives that I have too many of as markers and I found that these knives also make a good tool at the end when you're going to start planting these out into the garden and you're trying to get the soil out of these containers. This little knife here makes a good cutting tool to try and loosen the soil or cut out chunks of your plants when you're putting them into the garden. So just a little tip, these poppy seeds are super tiny. So I'm just going to sprinkle this whole package all over here. So up until now this has been a pretty good spot to keep these jugs safe from my dog and it's a good sunny spot. But I can see that my dog has already been sniffing this spot out and probably once the snow is all melted around here it may easily be able to jump into the back of this old trailer and get at my jugs so I need to come up with a little extra safety plan for these jugs so that Jax can't get at them and ruin all my hard work. So I hope you enjoyed watching my video today on winter sewing. Please remember to like, leave a comment and subscribe so you don't miss out on any more videos coming to the channel.