 Hello and welcome to the channel. So in today's video we are going to be doing some planting of some annual flower seeds today. Here in growing zone 3 we are about 14, 13 weeks away from our last frost date. So it's getting towards that time where certain flowers that take quite a long time to germinate and get going should be started. So today I'm going to be doing a whole variety of petunias and some pansies. So what I'm doing first here and I just wanted to show you was I am trying to collect some seeds from a bunch of flowers that I picked last fall. So the way I try to sift out my seeds is I'm just using a colander like this. It's got some fairly large holes and then a sieve that's got you know quite fine mesh. Petunia seeds are very very fine so we're going to just try to run it through these two layers and see what kind of seeds we end up with. So when you're collecting petunia seeds in the fall you want to look for branches that have these little pods here and inside them they should be full of tiny little black seeds. I'll see if I can show you that. I crack open the pod you can see there's some very tiny tiny petunia seeds. So I'm just going to kind of squeeze and twist off all these little pods. Just kind of squeeze them in my fingers. Run them through these two layers of sieves and we'll see what we end up with at the bottom here. Give a little shake and we'll see what we got next. Here we have a lot finer so I am just going to lift it up here and you can see that there are a lot a lot of seeds on this white paper now. So I think we got quite a good harvest here of this variety of petunias. So once you've got that done I just got a little package here that I've marked with the name of the flower and the color. So as you can see here now we've got a pretty good supply of purple petunia seeds here for planting today. Okay so we got our tray ready we got some seeds petunias and pansies and I got my seed starting mix here which is two parts peat moss with one part perlite. I've moistened it with some boiling water to kill off any fungus gnats or fungus gnats eggs because this is going to be going into the house and I don't want to take any bugs into the house whenever possible. So we went and got some seeds from some petunias from last year I have three varieties here. Purple this one I marked pink purple and this one I had marked pink white stripe petunia but when I was pouring off my seeds after I was shelling in my accidentally put some purple into this one so these three are just going to be planted you know sporadically here I'm not going to worry too much about the color and we'll see how that turns out. So I did buy some petunia seeds as well and these ones are kind of a unique color they're almost a black color so I wanted to try these out and hopefully be able to save some seeds this year but just to give you an idea of how tiny and expensive petunia seeds are this is a $4 pack of seeds and you only get 10 petunia seeds and what they do is they pellet them so that they're a little bit easier to work with. So I want to be very careful planting these to make sure we have you know good germination and hopefully get 10 plants out of these 10 seeds. So this is a 72 cell tray so I am going to be planting up my 10 black petunias here all separately in different separate cells so that we can hopefully get good germination and then I'm going to try and put in about three rows of pansies and then the rest will be just a whole mixture of petunia seed. So if we get good germination in these 72 cells that'll give me a good amount of flowers for sure. So I'll start off by filling up these 72 cells once you've got them about halfway full. Just kind of press it down with your fingers to try and compact it in a little bit. You don't want it too compact but you don't want any air pockets in there. So once these petunias and pansies do germinate and grow a couple weeks and get to that two leaf stage or past that two leaf stage I will start watering them with a very diluted solution, a fertilizer every week or two. Petunias and pansies can be heavy feeders so give them a good start. And these two kinds of flowers are really good for my growing zone here in zone three Saskatchewan because they are very hardy. They can take a frost. Pansies sometimes even will self seed and you might find them coming up again somewhere in your garden the following year. They are a biannual I believe. The petunias are great because they just keep blooming and blooming as long as you keep them well watered and fertilized and make sure you deadhead them every couple weeks. They will just keep blooming all summer long. Kind of just feel around and check them to make sure there's not a lot of air pockets. Some of these a little more topping up here. Okay so we will start with these black petunia seeds and I'll try to hopefully get you zoomed in enough so you can see what I'm doing here. Be very careful not to lose any of them. You can see apparently there's ten seeds there. I'm going to try and put one into each. I'm just going to drop it on the top of the soil. I think I dropped two in there. I did. Okay I got them separated so that's good. Nine, ten. I got exactly ten. No bonus. Can't believe that's all you get. So I'm just going to lightly press it down with my finger right now and I think I'm going to just once I get them all planted I'm just going to put a light layer of vermiculite on the top. So next are going to be the pansies. So I'm going to start them here at these last two spaces and then I think I'll try to get three rows going here if I can because it seems like I've got a pretty good supply seeds here. Pansy seeds are bigger, naturally bigger than petunia so they're a little easy to work with. I'm going to not worry about whether I get one or two. Probably we'll do two per cell just to help increase the chance of germination. Oh god I just put it in with my petunia. Oh man when I'm talking and planting it at the same time it's bad. I'm going to have to try and get that out of there. Okay so I said I was going to just do three rows of pansies. So I think I'm going to shut off the camera see if I can retrieve that pansy out of that cell that I double planted with the petunia. So I've marked with my markers here. My pansies as ends here goes all the way to these three rows. I got my block petunias marked for these two and now I got seven rows by six that are going to be more petunias. I'm just going to sprinkle a little of each of these colors down each row. So these are some of the seeds that I took from last year's plants and you can see there's a lot of kind of chafe in with the seeds a little bit of you know dried up leaves and stems what not but there's still you know you can still see the seeds pretty good and just grab a little pinch and spread them. In each cell once we see how good the germination is I probably will thin these out so I'm going to just do two rows of this color. So petunia seeds should germinate within five to 15 days and the pansies is a little bit longer can be up to 20 days before you see germination. I'm going to be setting this downstairs under the grow lights on a heat mat which should help kind of speed along that germination. So we will keep an eye and see how quickly they germinate. So hopefully these seeds that I have harvested from my last year's plants are going to germinate and we have a good success with sprouting here. So I'm just giving it a light layer of water before we put some vermiculite on the top. Just be careful that make sure you use something like this what's got a light spray on it. You don't want to disturb those seeds or wash them away. So if you don't have vermiculite you can just use more of the seed starting mix to cover. I like to use this because it helps retain the moisture and kind of prevents that damping off or mold issue that sometimes you get on the top of your spots here. Okay this is ready to go under the lights. So this is what the setup looks like now under the grow lights. So I have my tray sitting on a heat mat and I will be bottom watering this every day and I got a humidity dome on top until they get germinating. I have two sets of these Fiat grow lights running 16 hours on and 8 hours off. And you don't necessarily have to go out and buy seed trays and these dome covers to put on your flowers. You can always use different food containers that you you know get salads and muffins in and this is one of those containers that you get like a rotisserie chicken from. These work really good for starting seeds. I didn't show this on camera but I did plant up also some of these white petunias. So I just used this chicken container. I put a bunch of holes in the bottom of it and then I have a second tray underneath so I can bottom water. So one of these setups works good. Put these under the lights and we will wait for germination. Okay so it has been about 12 days since we planted up the pansies and petunia seeds here and I'm just wanting to do a quick check in to show you how the germination has been going. Under here is where we planted the black petunias. These were the pelleted seeds that I purchased for $4 and only got 10 seeds. We got the pansies that I purchased from the store and then we got all the petunias that I harvested seeds from last year's flowers. So as you can see the ones that I just sprinkled around from the seeds I collected from last year's plants there is a lot of germination happening. Gonna have to thin them out of course because you can see there is a lot little tiny petunias coming up in each cell. So I'll just watch it for a couple weeks and thin them out. Some of the cells may not have any petunias in them so I may just transplant them over. We'll see how that goes. Over here with the pansies you can see try to zoom in here. Got a few popping up a little bit harder to see and see there's a couple there. And the black petunia so far I'm not seeing much germination so I'm a little worried that my $4 investment is not gonna take me very far. I think I am spotting a couple on sorry it probably doesn't show up in the camera very well but I think I'm spotting a couple that are peeking through. So maybe being that they're pelleted it takes them a little longer to break down and germinate. So still hoping to see I get you know a good supply of these black petunias. These are the white ones that I planted up in this chicken rotisserie chicken container. As you can see they have germinated really well. These were also pelleted but they seem to germinate a lot quicker than the black petunia ones. So everything's looking good. I will keep you updated throughout the month. I'm hoping that these will stay in these cells for probably another month or so before they have to be potted up. Once I get good germination I will remove this. I will remove the heat mat from underneath. Just keep them under the lights. 16 hours on, 8 off is how my timers are set up. And eventually these will have to move out to the garage to the to the windows because gotta make room for more stuff under the grow lights here. So I would love to hear your comments. Hit that like button. Don't forget to subscribe. Keep watching for more indoor planting and getting ready for the outdoor garden season. Thanks for watching.