 Hi there and welcome to getting clean on the prairies. It is a beautiful spring day here on the Saskatchewan prairies and the snow has pretty much all melted out of my garden here, so I'm just out checking things out. I was having a look through my winter sowing jugs here, and I'm excited to say that I have found some sprouts in some of them. So before I show you which ones are sprouting, I just want to take you for a little walk around my garden. So as you can see here, we have very little snow left, just a few banks here and there. Today is about plus six degrees Celsius. Tomorrow supposed to be up to 13 degrees Celsius. So it's going to be a couple nice warm days, but some more snow. Snow and rain is coming this week, but that's okay. Moisture is always good at this time of year. So this is my lasagna garden bed, and this is where I've been planting my perennial flowers and filling in with some annual flowers. So I did a video last last season on how to on how I put together this lasagna garden. I got cardboard, compost, I got some layers of leaves, branches, and some more compost and leaves. I gave it a pretty good layer this fall, last fall. So I'm going to be putting some more perennials in here. I'm just trying to get a nice perennial flower bed going. Planted some asparagus plants in here last summer that I'm hoping will come back this spring and going to see if I can get some strawberries going in here as well because I've read that asparagus and strawberries are good companions in the garden. So hopefully the strawberries I got going indoors will grow and I can put them out here. Right here is my patch where I put in a bunch of garlic. So we'll be watching for that to come out. These are my two raised garden beds that I did a lot of tomatoes. I did beets, carrots, onions, radishes, peppers. I used the square foot gardening method on these and it really does allow you to plant a lot of things in a small space. So I will probably do that again this year in these two raised garden beds. And these are my container gardens. You've seen these in a lot of my videos. These are red mineral tubs that we have from our cattle. We purchase these for the cattle. They lick them clean and they are food grade safe and they make great containers. And I have no end of supply of these. Some of them I've created a self-wicking system on them, but I also just have some where I just drill some holes down in the in the bottom and they work. They seem to work just as good. So I will probably be doing a video soon on how to get one of these set up with materials. I'll show you a cheap and easy way to fill these up. And then all through my garden here, I have straw. This is pea straw that we happen to have on our farm. So I've been using it to cover the ground and grow my potatoes. It works really well using the root stout method here for our potatoes. So I will be doing that again this year. And the compost bins I've been dumping in all winter. So they need to be stirred up and hopefully I can get some finished compost or partially finished compost just to add in. I like to throw some of the unfinished compost underneath the straw here before I plant potatoes and let it break down. Add some nutrients to the soil. Back here behind my garden space is where we put in some dwarf cherry trees. These I also mulched with pea straw and cardboard just to keep the weeds down. We have a lot of quack grass out here. So and it was necessary for us to cage these because of the deer that come into our yard. Any little bushes that they can get their horns on or that they can browse on they will wreck. So it's necessary for us to always cage any trees or bushes we don't want them to destroy. They did get into my mulch leaf stash. I had these bags filled with mulch leaves that I was going to use in my garden this spring and the deer pawed their way through the snow and pretty much made a big mess of them and also left a lot of deer turds in them. So that was a little bit disappointing. Okay, so we are back here at my winter sowing jug collection that I had going and if you've been watching some of my winter sowing videos I started planting some in early January. I did some perennial flowers. I've got a few herbs going, strawberries. So I came out here today to see if I can see any sprouts. It hasn't been super warm here yet. So I wasn't really expecting anything to be sprouted yet. But what I did find here is stuff that I had planted in these ice cream pales seems to be the ones that are sprouting first. So this is the Kohlrabi and I hope that I can get the camera here so you can see this. Try to zoom in on it, but there's quite a few seeds coming up here. So we'll see how those make out. I'm finding the soil here in these containers is still quite moist. So that's good. So we'll be keeping an eye on these to see if they make it through germination and grow into some good plants. This is the bok choy and I spotted a few little sprouts there. You can see those. The nice thing about these containers is they're easy to remove the lids and let in some air during the day and when you go to harden them off, they'll be easy to take the lids on and off. So I'm hoping these work out. This is my broccoli and I spotted one sprout in there. And the last container that I found sprouts in is chamomile. So I use this takeout container. It's not very deep, so I'm not sure if this is going to be a good container to use once they start growing, but I'll be able to take out the lid and I did spot one little sign of life here in the bottom there. I hope you can see that. Again, this one is also very very moist as well. These containers, the ice cream and this one seem to be retaining moisture a lot better than the jugs. I'm not sure why. These all feel pretty light and are looking pretty dry. So there's going to be a chance of snow and rain this week. So I'm just going to leave them for now and maybe get some kind of a container that I can set them in. I can do some bottom watering and make sure that they stay moist. I kind of buried them in my peace draw here to give them a bit of insulation and hopefully retain some of the moisture as well. So I'm not sure yet if it's just because of the types of seeds I planted in the ice cream pails or if it's the the container that I planted them in that's making a difference, but we will monitor and keep track of how things progress here with my winter sowing. I will be back to check on them periodically now and keep you updated on what was successful and what wasn't. I also do plan on trying some of the tender crops such as tomatoes and peppers using the winter sowing method. I did try a tomato plant in one of these jugs last April that sprouted and grew and I transplanted it into my garden and it did good. So I'm excited to expand that into peppers and see what we can get growing here. So I hope you enjoyed my update on my spring garden here and I'm very excited that it is finally time to get out here and get things going. I have a lot of videos planned for my channel on how I get ready for spring. I will be doing some prepping of my containers, getting the raised beds ready and we'll keep you updated on what's going on with the winter sowing here as well. So if you enjoyed this video, please don't forget to like, leave a comment, hit the subscribe button and don't forget to hit the notification bell so you don't miss out on the next video. Thanks for watching.