 Hello, and welcome to the channel. So 48 days ago, I started my herb garden here in my I-Dew hydroponic system here. So this is very similar to what's commonly known as the arrow garden, where you fill up the container with nutrient water. You start some seeds in these little pods here, and then you have a light that comes on. This one is, I believe, on a schedule of 16 hours on, eight hours off. So I just wanted to show you what a great growth we have going here. Like I said, it's been 48 days. I've been probably harvesting herbs off of this for the past month already, just coming and taking little clips. When I'm cooking, I have oregano, thyme, basil, two oregano plants, two thyme plants, and then this is a garlic chive. So I just wanted to show you my little system that I have going here. This is my no-power required herb dryer that I purchased off of Amazon. It's a cute little small mesh dryer here that I am just going to start putting some of my herbs in. Because one of the things that I find when you grow in these systems, you get so much herb so fast, it's hard to keep up to using them fresh, and I want to be able to preserve them. I like to take all my herbs and just make a nice Italian blend that you can use in your cooking, dry it out. So that's what we're going to do today. I'm just going to start harvesting a little bit of each of these, and you simply can just set them in here, kind of lay them out so that they get lots of airflow and let them dry naturally. That way you're not worrying about running a dehydrator, or you know filling it up all the time, and you can just kind of pick these as as they grow, you don't have to wait until you have a large supply of these to run the dehydrator, and it's a great little system. Time has grown really well here. I'm just going to chop it back as well. So basically that is all that you need to do, and the nutrient water level goes down fairly fast now that these are growing because they, you know, they got lots of roots, as you can see. So about once a week, I just top it up with full-strength nutrient water, and they just keep growing and growing. So I will keep this herb garden going as long as I can. I know I will be probably growing herbs outdoors in my garden just because it's nice to have those fresh garden herbs out from outdoors, and they help with controlling bugs in your vegetable garden, so they're a good companion to have out in the garden as well. So as you can see, there are several levels here that you can, you know, if you want to keep your herbs separated, so if you just want to keep your basil so you can store it separately. I'm just putting everything in one together. I'll maybe spread it out so it's got a little more air. So then when I'm just ready to make them into an herb blend, I can just throw them into my my bullet and buzz them up, and I got some nice herbs for my spice cupboard. You can, of course, wash your herbs and pat dry them before you put them in here. I just don't think that they're getting that dirty down here in my basement. And you can just zip them shut so no little buggies or anything gets in there. So I think that's just a slick little thing. I purchased it on Amazon. I'll put the link in the description box below so you can check it out on Amazon. I think it was 20 bucks. I'll have to, I'll put that in the description. I can't remember right now how much it cost, but pretty cheap. So things are getting pretty busy down here in my growing space. I'm starting to get a lot of things started that will be going outdoors into the outdoor garden. So I thought I'd give you a little tour kind of of what's growing so far, what my plans are. I've got a few failures here and there that aren't working out so good, but I'll just turn the camera around and we'll take a little tour here. So I'm going to start with my petunias and pansies that I, it's probably been, God, it's got to be close to a month, three weeks since I started these. And I didn't get really great germination overall. As you can see, I have 72 cells here, but what I'm going to plan on doing is get this in some good light and start picking away at some of these little clusters of petunias, thinning them out and then just filling in these empty cells that nothing germinated in. I don't think you can even see this under a camera, but one of the things that I was trying to grow was black petunias and I planted 10 seeds here and only three have come up and they are super, super tiny. Not sure if you're going to be able to see it, but I'm really hoping that they are going to grow and I'll at least get three plants out of this package that cost me, I think, five bucks or something for these 10 seeds, but for whatever reason, they're not growing as fast as the other petunias, but overall not too bad. These are all pansies and again, not the best germination, but I can spread some of these around. They're not really sure why, but this variety of petunias that I planted, these are white petunias, maybe just a little bit different strand than what I planted below, but they sprouted and are taking off really well. I just got them in this plastic container. It's one of those rotisserie chicken containers, but they are doing really well. Eventually I will probably have to thin them out, but for now they can stay in this container. Over here is a little bit of a failed project. I had rosemary and lavender seeds stratifying in the fridge for a good month. I had them in a wet paper towel for, like I say, about a month, and then I planted them up here in about three weeks and I'm just finally getting some lavender sprouting here, but not very good germination and no sign of any rosemary at all. Not sure why, but rosemary has been a real challenge for me this year to get going. So I'll give that rosemary maybe another few days, but it's taking up valuable space under the lights and probably will be tossing this into the compost pile and using this container in space for something else. Up here is some of my coleuses and potato ivy that I had propagated off of plants last fall and been growing all winter. I've been just rooting them in water and repotting them. I've got several of these potted coleuses all over my house. Some are upstairs in with my plants upstairs. Some are here in the window. Some are over there by my arrow garden just taking in some of that light from the arrow garden. So hopefully I will have a good supply of these when it comes time to putting them out into my flower beds and pots. So on this level here I got my onions, which I've been growing probably for a good month now. I've been bottom watering them. About once a week I fertilize them with a very diluted soluble fertilizer in my watering can just to give them a little extra food, but they seem to be doing okay. This here is another 72 cell tray of flowers that I have going. As you can see this has been very successful and I'm not sure what I'm going to do with all these. I need to have a plan of how I'm going to repot these and you know up pot them into more pots. It's going to be a big job, but I have really good success here. So these are snap dragons, another variety of coleus, some corals colored snap dragons, portulaca, elissum. I'm not sure why some of this elissum looks so much bigger and different than these, but they all came out of the same packet. Then I got two rows of lobelia and one row of dianthus. So I had really good germination success with these flowers and hopefully probably in the next month I'll have to do some transplanting and move these out to my garage windows. Down on this shelf I have some grasses planted and these are the ones that I did a video on just a couple weeks ago. That was the foxtail millet that I acquired from a planter in the city that I just took a chunk of one of the heads off of. I'm not seeing any sprouting action at all. So I'm not sure if that's going to work out or not, but I'm stuck in a few more of the seedlings into the dirt again just today. So we're going to give it another couple weeks and see if we can get any success with that grass. And I also have two more grasses planted here I'm very excited about. So these were three seeds that I acquired at a seed exchange in the city a couple weeks ago and these are native prairie grasses. One is called a blue grama grass and one is called a little blue stem. So I just planted these up now and hopefully these will be something that will go into my flower bed this spring. The last thing that's under my lights here that is also taking a long time to germinate is impatience. So these were seeds that I you know I've had for a couple years. I wasn't sure if they maybe weren't very good seeds, but today I see I am finally getting a little bit of germination with the impatience and there are a variety of colors. So hopefully we get a lot more going here in this container. So this is what's going on in the grow tent right now. As far as my crack key hydroponics I still have a nice container of lettuces going here. I have aruvula and romaine and some leafy greens. I just harvested a bunch about a day or two ago and so far it keeps growing back. So I will keep that going as long as I can. And then in the far corner over here is another crack key tomato. Kind of get pushed back to the corner but it is starting to as you can see it's got some tomatoes there that are just starting to turn color. So might have a ripe tomato in a week or so. So I'm starting to make space in my grow tent to do some of my seed starting and these are all my peppers, sweet peppers that I planted up about a week ago. I think it's been about seven or eight days starting to see a couple of them pop through the surface. Got a little bit of issue with maybe too moist and getting a little bit of green kind of mold on the top of my soil here, but I do see more seedlings popping through the soil. I've started another seedling here that I'm going to be setting up in crack key for this cucumber so it'll go in a container of nutrient water and I'll let it grow up the sides here of my tent and we'll hopefully have some cucumbers in another four to six weeks. This is my sweet potatoes that I started from slips. I bought the sweet potatoes at the grocery store. There were a purple purple variety and so far they're doing well here in the grow room and probably my plan is because they're taking up some space here that I will move them maybe upstairs into a sunny window until it's warm enough to put them outside but for now they have room in the grow tent. And I started a whole bunch of native flowers in winter sowing jugs and because I had so many seeds left I thought I might as well see if I can get some going indoors. So I got some galardia, some blue flax, bergamot, yarrow, and some cone flower. Most have started sprouting now except for the yarrow. I just planted that a couple days ago but I thought you know I got room, got the containers. These can go in a sunny window in the garage in the next month or so. So next on my to-do list is to get my tomatoes going and I'm trying to narrow it down to I got nine varieties here I want to plant. See if I can narrow that down maybe. I'm going to be using the solo cup method. A special technique that I'd like to use and I will be making a video and probably sharing it next week. So don't forget to subscribe, leave a comment, hit that like button so you don't miss out on future videos coming to the channel. Thanks for watching and happy gardening.