 So I don't know about you but I have really noticed that the price of flowers and different bedding plants that you get at the greenhouse are really going up in price. I used to be able to go and buy all the flowers and fillers for my pots and flower beds at the greenhouse easily for less than $100. Now if I was to buy everything that I actually wanted it would be hundreds of dollars. So the last few years I have been starting a lot of my flower seeds myself indoors and I want to show you that you know it's not really that hard and it is a great way to save money. So I'm going to be doing some pansies, petunias, coleases, these are things that I love to put in my pots and in my flower beds. I've collected some petunia seeds which I have shown how to do in other videos. It's very easy. So let's get started and let's get planting some flowers. So if you are someone who starts your vegetables indoors like your tomatoes, peppers, onions, eggplants, those kind of things that need to be started indoors you know before the several weeks before the last frost date then you may have a lot of supplies you need just to do the flowers and one of the things here that I like to use is a 72 cell system. This is also great for you know spacing issues if you don't have a lot of space to start your indoor seedlings. I can say you can get a lot going in this small space. It fits nicely on a seedling heat mat which is which I highly recommend for flowers because it really helps with that success rate and that uniform germination. I don't start tons of tomatoes and peppers from my garden. I'm a small gardener so I like to use these solo cups or you know something that is like a three or four inch size pot to start my tomatoes peppers and squashes maybe indoors right in one of these so I don't have to worry about potting up. But for flowers I like a whole ton of them like you can never have too many petunias and pansies you know there's always somewhere you can stick them so that's kind of where I focus on more of you know quantity as opposed to my vegetables because you know I want a lot of them once they are to get to that you know four or six leaf stage and they need to be potted up into bigger containers. We're getting close to you know last frost date I got lots of sunlight in my garage windows so if you have sunny windows it's very easy to transfer them into a sunny window and you don't have to worry about space under the grow lights. So I'm going to show you first of all how to get the tray set up here so because we're just going to be using this for starting the seeds and then potting them up into larger containers later I'm just going to be using a seed starting mix such as this Jiffy premium it just is a mixture of sphagnum moss a little bit of vermiculite so it's very light it's very easy for the seeds to germinate you don't want anything too heavy so I filled it all up and want to make sure that you don't have any air pockets in it so when you get it about halfway filled it's a good idea to go around and press that dirt in make sure it's in there good and tight you can also moisten it prior to putting into your cells if you want I actually put it in dry and then bottom filled the tray with a bunch of water and also gave the top a good spraying so either way works it's up to you and so as I am planting up the seeds it's going to be wicking up the water from the bottom and setting it up in a tray like this is highly recommended so that you can bottom water your seedlings as opposed to surface watering because that can just place your seeds it also can you know help bring on that damping off problem where you get a bit of bacteria or mold growing on your surface here that can kill off your seedlings so I'm just doing two colors of petunias today I may plant some more but I like to have a good supply of white petunias because they you know they go good with anything so white petunias can be hard to find sometimes in greenhouses they get picked quickly and the supply usually dwindles very quickly in greenhouses so I always like to get a good supply of white going and I've really been liking these black petunias they're called the Sophistic Blackberry they make a really nice showcase in a container with the white but as you can see the price here on these petunias is $4.99 and this is what you get it's a little holder here that I think has 10 pelleted seeds in it so basically they're costing you $0.50 a piece and germination rate you know not sure how successful it's going to be so last fall I pulled some of the branches off of my black petunias I just kept them in a paper bag over winter and then this spring I just kind of went through them and sifted them and I got a very small supply of super tiny seeds here so we're going to try starting those as well and we can compare to see you know how these ones that I harvested from last year's plants do compared to the the new seeds that I just purchased pansies unfortunately I didn't collect seeds last year and it's super easy I don't know sometimes you just fall things get away on you and I didn't get any collected but they also are very easy to collect but we're just going to try to get a good variety going here $2 not a lot to spend. Coleus, Coleus is one of my favorites to put into pots and so I thought I'll just start off with one of these rainbow mixes that gets you a whole different variety of different Coleuses and we will see how successful we are with getting these going so when you're working with these tiny little seeds I highly recommend if you get some kind of a little white dish like this or a clear dish something that you can safely put your seeds into while you work with them because man if you spill these you know they're gone make sure you don't sneeze where they could be all blown away so I'm just going to try and open up this and dump them in here I like to work with a toothpick as well so I just wetted my toothpick so that I could easily grab one of these seeds you can see that you can pick it up quite easily just gently put it on top of the soil here I'm not going to press it in too far try to put one per cell and hopefully last year I did the same thing I planted 10 I only got two or three successfully germinate so that was a little disappointing somehow I've only got nine here I don't know somewhere I think I planted two accidentally in one and they said it's really hard to see once you got this in here and there's vermiculite and little pieces of stuff so no big deal I'm just going to go with that I want to be able to mark this so I know exactly where I planted these so I've made these little markers here I'm going to put one right here mark these three I'm just going to put a little dollar sign just showing that those are the ones that I purchased and paid for keep track now we don't want to bury these too deep and we don't want them to get displaced when we water them so I'm just going to use a little bit of this vermiculite it's nice and fine just to cover it up you can also use just a little more of the seed starting mix as well that will work and because these are pelleted they got a bit of a coating on them I expect that these will take longer to germinate than the ones that I harvested from my my outdoor plants they usually pop up pretty quick so I just dumped in my seeds that I had harvested myself for the black petunias in there now it's pretty hard to see but there are quite a few little tiny seeds in there there's also you know a lot of just chafe and stuff from the plant so it's you know really hard to to separate them so I'm going to just try to do a light sprinkle in as many cells as I can here see how many of these I can get going I don't know but you can kind of feel the the thickness of the seed between your fingers compared to whether it's just you know pieces of chafe broken up leaves so I think I'm going to be getting you know several of these in each of these cells I get a little sloppy here I know sometimes you end up with stuff growing in in the cell next to it because things kind of jump around but that's okay again I'm just going to cover with the light layer of the vermiculite I was able to collect quite a few more white petunia seeds this year so pretty good supply here again there's a lot of chafe and ground up plant material but I can see that we seem to have some seeds in there so I'm going to try and get two rows of the white petunia going here and I'm just going to sprinkle so petunias are super super tiny when they first germinate you have to really look hard to spot them but it's very exciting to see when they do and they seem to be pretty hardy if you got them on a heat mat and you know you're keeping them moist and warm they do well and you know they're not super fast growers you can keep them in these trays for you know a good month or so before you have to start thinking about potting them up so the pansy seeds are quite a bit larger and I think a little bit easier to work with okay so four rows of pansies are planted and running low in my vermiculite but hopefully I'm gonna have enough to cover everything here today as I said you can also just use some of the seed starting mix to cover just very lightly most of these types of flower seeds need light to germinate so you don't want to bury them too deep so now I'm going to be setting these on a heat mat under grow lights that will be set to come on for about 16 hours a day shut off for eight hours the heat mat will be on 24 hours a day on the whole time until germination and once your seedlings get to you know pass that two leaf stage and are getting going that's usually when you want to remove it off of the heat mat okay so there is 72 cells of a whole variety of flowers all planted up as far as seeds here I've invested about $10 I use some of the seeds that I collected myself I'm using a container that I've you know get many years use out of seed starting mix is very economical and if you can get these to germinate and up pot them into bigger cells so I think you know doing it this way you are saving yourself a hundred if not several hundred dollars you could do this on a couple different 72 inch cells and get all sorts of flowers started I know I will be starting some more later in the season that don't take as long most of these are 10 to 12 weeks before last frost date so that's why we're starting them now so these are ready to go under the grow lights it's also recommended if you have a humidity dome like this to put it on top to help keep that moisture in there so as I mentioned earlier having a seedling heat mat under flowers is highly recommended it really helps speed up that germination and helps you know with more consistent germination so if you haven't done so I would recommend doing these if you're one who's starting plants indoors tomatoes peppers flowers you know a seedling heat mat is always going to get used and will last you for many years so I've just lowered the lights here to get as close as I can to the surface here so that they are getting the maximum light when they germinate these are just LED lights that I purchased I believe from Lowe's they are a fiat brand they are not actual grow lights they're just LEDs and they've been working great for me in all my indoor growing for the past couple years I'll leave a link to them below so flowers are planted I got ornamental grasses started onions are going next so please stay tuned for the next video coming up on the channel I hope you enjoyed this one and I hope you will try growing your own flowers indoors saving yourself tons of money and thank you for watching see you on the next video