 Hello and welcome to Little Garden on the Prairies. So tonight I'm going to be planting up some new vegetables that are going to be going into my growth garden and for the first time we're going to try something new that I've never grown indoors before and I'm very excited about and that is some sugar snap peas. So these are four little plants that I have started from seed. Just in the rock wool here I put them in some rock wool surrounded them by some of these clay balls. I've had them under the grow lights for I think a couple of weeks and I think I planted five in here. Four of them have grown so we're going to set these up now in a crack key hydroponic system and get them growing in the grow kit. So as you'll see all over my basement garden these are my go-to containers for the crack key method. They work perfectly. I love everything about these. So the reason I choose these all the time is they are lightweight. The color of the container and the lid lock out the light so it helps with that LJ. They have a little handle here so they're easy to move around and grab inside your tanner off the shelf. And when it comes time to cutting a hole you don't have to have any drills or anything special. Just have your net cup here to measure with an exacto knife and you're good to go. So I just kind of trace around my net cup here with this exacto knife. You can wear gloves if you're a little scared of getting cut but usually if you have a nice board underneath it acts as a good cutting board. So once you have that circle traced out you're just a matter of kind of holding your knife down firmly and twisting trying to stay on that pattern. It's not going to be a perfect circle and you can adjust it after but like I said you don't need any drills or anything fancy tools to cut through these lids. You can see how easy that was. Then I just check to see if it fits. You can see it's a little bit tight so I just need to kind of slowly make the circle a little bit bigger so that net cup just sits in there nicely. So after you've trimmed it up and got it fitting so that the cup slides right in there you're ready to go. Now we're just going to fill up the container and get the nutrients ready. Okay so let's talk about the nutrients that we are going to be mixing up here now for my peas. So I have been using this three-part blend here from Holland Secret. It's been working good. I don't know if it's any better than any other product out there but it just happens to be the blend that I purchased. I've been using it for everything that I'm growing this year and so far everything's doing good. So when I start up a new plant in my cracky method I usually follow the early vegetative measurements. So this at the back will give you different stages of your plant and then you're supposed to kind of follow those measurements for the three parts based on what stage your plant is at. So I say we're past the seedling cutting stage. We're going to get to the early vegetative stage, mix up a very diluted blend of nutrients for these little plants to start feeding off of. So I'm going to mix it up here. I also have been adding calcium and magnesium. This is called Cali Magic. I usually put some of that into all of my water as well. So I just started adding this into my nutrient water last year about midway through the season and I think it seems to help with my cucumbers and my tomatoes and so now I just add it to my blend all the time so I recommend that as well. So I have, I guess to make it I have about three liters of water in this container that's going to be for the peas. The measurements on here are based on four liters so I'm just going to downsize it a little bit in my measurements. I try not to worry about it too much and then afterwards we'll test the pH and the ECs on these just to make sure we're not too strong. So I just did a quick Google on what the EC level and pH should be for hydroponic peas and it looks like the EC levels kind of on the lower end compared to some of the other plants needs so we're going to just check and see this might be a little bit too strong. So we'll see first of all what the readings are. So I'm going to first do the pH reading and it says here for peas the pH should be somewhere between six and seven. That's kind of the pretty much a standard for any of my hydroponic vegetables that I'm growing that it should be somewhere in that six to seven range. When you're using the pH meter usually you have to hold it in here for about 30 seconds and it is holding at about 6.3 so pH is good. And this is just tap water that I'm using for all my hydroponics. It is city treated water but usually what I do is I fill up two or three big jugs in my shower down here and let it sit for at least a day or two and then let all those the chlorine and all the treatments that have gone into it kind of settle and it's been working good for me. So now I'm going to check the EC here and it says here that EC for peas should be between 0.8 and 1.8 and my EC is coming at 1.6 so that's good. So it shouldn't be too strong for the peas to start off with so we are ready to get these peas into some nutrient water. So up until now these peas have been just watered with plain water they haven't gotten any nutrients which you know seedlings don't need initially and I don't think you'll be able to see this but if you can see this without me spilling but there are some little tiny weeds there are some little tiny roots popping out the bottom and I've got it set up so that they will reach the water but not fully submersed the whole plant because you don't want to drown it and it does need some air so I'm just going to set that up and that is it. These four pea plants are going to go into the grow tent so I just want to show you the kind that I'm growing here these are called a sugar and snap pea I picked them because they are kind of a dwarf variety they don't grow super big because there's not a lot of room in my grow tent and they have a days to maturity of 60 days. What else can I tell you so these like I said are just a short plant with short vines that shouldn't need too much support so I think that's going to be an ideal type pea to be growing in the grow tent. So I'm also going to be adding another tomato plant to my grow tent this is actually a cutting that I had taken from my garden at the end of the season it's a roadster tomato which is kind of like a beef steak and I had it going in my grow tent and I had an accident one night in there and broke the plant right off right at the roots or right at the top of the container here so what I did was I just took the cutting put it in some water and I got it re-rooted again so it's all ready to go again it's got a nice strong stem here it's got some blooms already happening here in this little sucker piece so all we need to do is get it set up in the net cup and I'll try to set it up so that some of the roots are going through the bottom so they can get to the nutrient water right away get it set up in here doesn't need any rock pull or anything and I got my nutrient water all set up as well so you can see here just going to surround it with some clay balls lock out the light give it some stability and there we go it's back in business ready to go back into the grow tent so hopefully it's got a nice strong stock on it this time and we should see it producing some tomatoes in no time so let's go to the grow tent and see if we can make room for these two new plants let's try to set the camera up here so to give you a good visual of the space that I have in my grow tent I believe it's a 3 by 3 or 4 by 4 size so starting on this side we have my indeterminate tomato plant that I brought in from outdoors and it's just growing everywhere not sure if I'd ever do an indeterminate type tomato in a grow tent again because it just keeps growing and you have to keep chopping it down and I've got quite a bit of tomatoes coming these are sun gold cherry tomatoes which are my very favorite and I have eaten a few of them off of here already I have another tomato down here I have my two strawberry plants that I also dug up from the garden this fall and then put them into hydroponics and we've been enjoying two or three strawberry strawberries every few days off of here so it's been kind of a fun plant to have growing indoors over here in the back and over here on the sides here I have three types of cucumbers going they are all the path no karmic I probably didn't say that word I always have to look it up anyways they only produce female flowers so you don't have to worry about pollination and we have harvested about four cucumbers I think Preston's been able to take one on his lunch every day this week and we got more coming can't really see them right now but that is the first time I've had success with cucumbers in my hydroponics and I have two pepper plants going one's a hot pepper one is a mini bell they're just starting to send out blooms and so now we've got a make room or the peas so I'll give you a good close-up of what they look like right now so we can maybe check back in a couple days before I post this video and see if they're growing for now we don't have to worry about giving them anything to climb up and according to the package I shouldn't need to give it any trail of same but we'll see what happens so I'm just going to put it in the middle here this is the tomato that we just planted up and I believe it is a roadster beef steak tomato so the tents pretty full I have to be honest that once I get the pH and the EC set up for the first time I haven't been coming back and testing the levels on them and measuring and keeping track like I should I started off with good intentions but I just it's just a lot of work it's really hard to crawl around in a in a grow tent especially when you're you know older and got bad knees like I do so I'm just going with you know keeping track what they look like they look happy this one is sucking up lots of nutrient water every week so I'm just mixing up new batches at full strength at the you know blooming and fruiting stage and topping it up as well as the cucumbers so so far everything's looking green and happy and I think I better stop adding any more plants right now so like I said it's going to be a few days before I get my video posted so I'll come back give you a quick update and how things are doing after about three days in the grow so here we are three days later at the grow tent and I'll just give you another visual of what I got going on here with my indeterminate tomato as you can see start down here where I was showing you the other day it has grown all the way up into this corner here and it's not really getting much light so I'm thinking I need to cut it off again same with the cucumbers they're starting to grow above the light as well so I guess I need to figure out how to kind of train them back down and keep them going somehow under the grow lights here just give you a quick peek of cucumbers that are coming one just about ready to pick there got another one back there and in the back here some more coming these are the diva I think those are my favorite the diva they're kind of like a English cucumber but a nice skin and here are the peas so you can see one is kind of outgrowing the rest but they're definitely coming along okay this little guy's probably the slowest growing but we will keep an eye on them so I hope you enjoyed watching my planting of peas that'll be growing indoors hydroponically using the crack key method inside my grow tent vegetable garden so thank you for watching please feel free to leave me a comment hit that like button and don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss out on future videos coming to the channel thank you and happy gardening