 Hi there and welcome to my channel. Today is, we are at mid-January and the temperature outside right now on the Saskatchewan prairies is minus 26 degrees Celsius. My American friends is about minus 15 degrees Fahrenheit. So even though it is super cold outside it is the perfect time to start winter sowing. So if you haven't tried winter sowing before I'm going to show you in today's video how to set up your winter sowing containers from start to finish. I'm going to try and give you some tips and tricks things to remember when you're doing this type of method. And once these are planted up they're going to go outside into the snow and they're going to sit and wait there until spring. And hopefully we will have some seedlings starting mid March to April that we will be planting in our outdoor garden. So I have a whole pile of flower seeds that I want to try winter sowing and get started today. So let's get started and I'll show you how to set them up. One great thing about winter sowing is it doesn't cost a lot of money to do it. What you want to start with is finding jugs that you can use. As you will see most videos that you see on winter sowing the good old four liter milk jug is the standard usually for winter sowing and it does work great. But if you don't drink milk or buy any product that uses this kind of a container there are other things you can use. I also like using these juice jugs. I have a lot of these in my home so I will show you how to get one of those ready as well. So to get your jugs ready I recommend having a drill like this if you can or if not just a sharp knife or a utility knife will work. And we got some pins to mark our jugs. I like to put a marker inside my jug as well as writing on the outside of the jug what's planted and the date. Plastic knives like this work good because I seem to have a lot of them that don't get used or a popsicle stick or some kind of marker inside for inside the jug. Scissors and some duct tape. I find just sticking with good old gray duct tape is the best to use. So lastly you want to have some good potting soil and I want to just remind people that it should not be seed starting mix like that you would normally use for your indoor starts. It should be a good potting soil that's got some nutrients in it. You know if you're going to spend money this is where you want to you know put in a little extra. Make sure you get a good name brand potting soil. I'll have the link to it below too so you can check the prices on it. Something else that I also wanted to just tell you about in previous years I used reused potting soil so I took some from my planters that I thought would you know be good way of reusing them. Mixed them with some new potting soil try to make it go a little bit further and in the spring I ended up with a lot of weeds growing in these jugs. So just be sure to use a good potting mix in your winter sewing jugs. So the first thing you want to do is get your jugs ready to put your soil in and the lid here can be removed and tossed. You do not want to have a lid on here. We're going to cut some holes in the bottom so there's good drainage and then we're going to create kind of a hinged lid here. So before you cut the hinge you always want to drill first in the bottom just makes it easier. There does not need to be any rhyme or reason to your holes as long as you've got sufficient drainage you can put about five or six holes in. So you can see there I got some holes in the bottom and like say if you don't have a drill you can just use a sharp knife just as long as you got some some kind of holes in the bottom and then to make the cutting of the lid here easier I always start with with a hole with my drill somewhere near the handle here about halfway up the container. Again if you have a knife you can just start it that way but I find it makes it easier for the cutting with the scissors and these jugs are usually pretty easy to cut. You want to create kind of a hinged handle on these so don't cut all the way around. I'm going to leave a little bit here. Uncut give it a bend so now you have a hinge. So the next thing we're going to do is fill this up with potting soil and get planting some seeds. So you want to make sure that your soil that you're planting in is really moist and has a lot of liquid in it. I'm going to start off by just adding some water to this mixture and then after we plant we'll give it a good spray and then I'll show you another technique I use to make sure that the the dirt is really good and moist. I have filled this up probably you know about three inches. You want to have about at least three three to four inches of dirt here so that the roots have lots of space when they start growing. And for this video I am going to be planting up some poppies. So this is all the seeds that came in this package not very many but I'm going to put them all in because I like to plant my flower seeds fairly thick in the container. Sprinkle them around and let them land where they may. I find with the flower seeds in the spring the success rate of sprouting is you know maybe 50% with most of them. Some get do better than others but you know they do tell you to try to stick with cool weather type plants such as you know perennial flowers ones that are hardy to you know colder zones such as ours here in zone 3. Cool weather vegetables such as lettuces and broccoli's cauliflower those kind of things. Herbs are another one that does really well. So after I have spread out the seeds I'm just going to put a light layer over top. This is fairly moist but I'm going to just give it another good spritz with this spray bottle. So we're going to be writing on the outside of here what's been planted and I always put the date but just in case sometimes the weather rain and the snow can wear away your words. I use a backup plan by just putting a stick on the inside as well. So if you have a popsicle stick or something like this that you can reuse this works good. Today is January 19. So it's pretty early but as long as your winter sewing jugs are going outside and they're going to be fully frozen it's okay to plant them anytime between now and you know up to four weeks maybe before your spring thaw. So one of the other reasons that I choose to try flowers using the winter sewing method is because of the fact that I do a lot of indoor starting for my seedlings for the garden I have you know tomatoes peppers cucumbers all sorts of different vegetables. In addition to flowers it takes up a lot of space indoors so I like to try as many flowers as I can using this method just to try and see how successful they are. I do end up purchasing a lot from the garden centers in the spring because you know flowers can be a lot more challenging to get going. So for this jug and we're going to try some nasturtiums which I love to have in my garden. They're great to plant and put amongst your vegetables to keep away certain insects and these also are listed as a kind of a cool hearty type flower that you would plant in the early spring outdoors. So hopefully we can have some success with these as well. The nasturtium seeds are quite a bit bigger. So I'm probably only going to plant about 10 or so in here. So another thing that I want to try and I'm hoping to make a video here is doing some winter sewing later in the season because for this method it's not recommended to at least not in our zones here where it's very cold in the winter. So something like tomatoes and peppers are usually not successful using this method, especially if you set them outside right now in the freezing cold. Those types of seeds are not ones that you want to go through that stratification process of freezing and expanding and dealing with that. So what I did last year and I had pretty good success but I didn't film it is I started some tomatoes and peppers using the winter sewing jugs but I didn't set them outside until later in the spring when the temperatures are not so cold at night and I did have success with them sprouting and growing. You just can't compare them to indoor starts such as tomatoes and peppers when you grow them indoors and they're beautiful healthy plants you know in the late spring when you put them out in the garden. What I found with the ones that I planted in the jugs I kept them in there until mid-June you know even a few weeks after you've got your other tomatoes already in the ground I just kept them in here until they had a good healthy growth on them and transplanted them so probably late June into my garden and by the middle of the summer they were the same size as my tomatoes that I had started indoors. So watch for those videos because I'm gonna I'm gonna test that a little bit more with some of those more delicate type seedlings later in the spring using this method to see how it turns out. So getting the tape around the jug is also a bit of a tricky thing that I takes a little practice but I like to get the full piece spread out here and cut. Make sure you got enough to go all the way around we'll just start at one side just push down it doesn't have to sit totally perfect but get that tape wrapped around stick it on something else a little bit of an overlap and then you can just go around and make sure you've got a good seal all the way around your jug and the reason we put this tape on here and you know do this cutting and put this tape on here is in the spring when this starts to sprout and the plant starts to really grow sometimes it gets fairly warm in these they're like a mini greenhouse so they will get very warm so when it comes time to start hardening them off or getting them ready to be removed and planted you want to be able to take this tape off open up the jug let in a little more air but until that happens you want to just keep this all sealed up and you have just created yourself a little mini greenhouse and I'm just going to write it on the side and write the date where you write it is up to you I have found that for the most part my writing on the outside doesn't wear away there is the first one ready to go out into the cold cold cold so again you start where your one side of your hinge point here just wrap around these ones are very easy to seal up I don't recommend writing on the tape that is something that seems to wear off quicker than on the plastic so I'm going to be setting up a whole bunch more flowers I want to try some onions kind of just every day you kind of get looking through your seeds start thinking about spring start thinking about how much space you have indoors to do your starts this is a great method if you don't have the space to do indoor growing you may not want to invest in in lights and shelving and all the trays and everything that goes with it instead of going to the greenhouse and buying all this stuff next spring why not give this a try and see if it works okay so I have six jugs of flowers all set up now ready to head outside into the snow and the last thing I like to do is give these one more good watering so I have these in a tray here it's about a one inch tray and I'm just going to pour a bunch of water in and leave these jugs sitting for 20 minutes half an hour and let them absorb as much water as they can that way your soil is well saturated in the spring then when these thaw out these seeds are in some really healthy potting soil and got lots of moisture and just give them that extra little boost to get started up in the spring okay these jugs are ready to go so let's head outside so this is where I've decided to set up my winter sewing jugs right here in my garden I always try to put it somewhere where it's a little bit out of the wind so they you know don't get blown away right now today the weather has changed since yesterday when I started this video it's only about minus 10 I think right now it's warming up it's crazy how the weather is changing so fast since yesterday but we are they are forecasting freezing rain followed by snow for the next three days and lots of wind so it could be that these jugs get covered in a lot of snow and ice and that's okay because they're just going to sit here now until spring and then in the spring it that's when the fun starts and that's when you start coming out every day once the sun warms up these jugs and there's no more freezing at night I come out and it's always fun to just take a peek into your jug and see if you can see any signs of life coming so I hope that you will give winter sewing a try it's lots of fun if you have extra seeds just try anything it doesn't really matter even though they say the best luck is when you use you know cold hearty type seeds or perennials that are more likely to have success you can try anything if you got some extra seeds some extra jugs just go ahead and set one up and put it out in the snow and see what happens so I hope you enjoyed watching this video on how to winter sew and if you have any questions please leave them in the comments and don't forget to hit that subscribe button and stay tuned for more updates on winter sewing thanks for watching