 Hi there and welcome to Little Garden on the Prairies. So if you check out the view of my garden here on the Saskatchewan Prairies it doesn't look like spring is coming anytime soon but we did get a good pile of snow here in the last couple days which is great because that's moisture for the spring and it is almost mid-March so spring is coming and we do have to start getting things growing indoors so that we get a head start on all those plants before we get them out into the garden. So in today's video we are going to start up some onions from seed indoors. I have three different types that I am going to be trying out today so I've set up both of these onions also in the winter sowing method in the milk jugs. I've placed them outside in the snow hoping to see that they will germinate in the spring and kind of grow on their own with very little maintenance. Unfortunately we have a new puppy who seems to be getting into everything and he destroyed about four or five of my winter sowing jugs before I figured out that he was dragging them all over the yard and one of them was I think my Walla Walla onions so doesn't look like I'll have any in the winter sowing method but I have enough to try sowing these indoors. So we're going to be doing the Walla Walla, the red Cabernet and I have purchased these seeds last year from Heritage Harvest Seeds and these are some yellow globe onions. If you didn't already know there are three different types of onions based on days of sunlight that you have in your zone so there are short day onions, intermediate or neutral day onions and long day onions. So here up in the north in Saskatchewan Canada we of course have very long days of sunlight in the spring and summer so I always make sure that I choose onions that are suitable or known as long day onions. So it's always my hope that I'm going to have nice big bulbs last year with my first year planting onions from seed. They didn't turn out too bad they weren't super big like I was hoping but I keep watching other YouTube videos and picking up tips and tricks of how to get those nice big bulbs out in your garden but the first thing we need to do is get these started. So another bonus I'm going to show you on today's video is some planting up of some pansy seeds. Today I was out in my my garden shed and I found a bag that I had just thrown a bunch of dead pansies into a paper bag and left them on the shelf in there so I brought them into the house and I did a lot of foraging through all the dead flowers and I managed to find a few pods of seeds that I'm hoping I can germinate in some soil here today and get some more pansy flowers going for my outdoor garden. So let's get started. So I'm going to be planting up my onion seeds using these aluminum loaf pans that I purchased from the dollar store. I kind of like using these for starting seeds. They're easy to set up. They have a nice you know three inch depth that's good for seedlings and I just poke a bunch of holes in the bottom and I'm going to set them up in this tray here also from the dollar store so that I can bottom water. If you've watched me and other videos potting up I usually prepare my seed starting soil and moisten it with boiling water just so I like to do that just to give it a bit of extra sterilization just in case there's any chance of there being any fungus net eggs in the soil. It's always a pain to have fungus nets in your soil when you're doing your indoor growing so I find using the boiling water method is a good way to help prevent that and I've also added in a container full of worm castings that I had in my supply. I thought these onions are going to be spending all their indoor time in this container. I won't be transplanting them anywhere other than into the garden so I figured a little extra nutrition in the soil would do them some good. Okay so we got our containers already here to start spreading our seeds. So when it comes to planting onion seeds you don't have to plant them very deep and you can spread them around fairly thick. They don't mind being crowded at all which is nice. You don't have to worry about thinning them out once they do start growing. I'm hoping that I'm going to be keeping them in these containers right until I transplant them outside and at that time the onions their roots are very tough so they're pretty easy to pull apart and plant so I'm hoping that I won't have to thin them out or transplant them before they go outside. So the first one we're going to do here is the Walla Walla. Most onion seeds are pretty similar to look at. These are very black and they're fairly easy to spread around but I'm just going to pinch and try to spread them around as much as I can here. They do not need to be planted very deep either so we're just going to sprinkle a little bit of soil over the top. If I had some vermiculite I would sprinkle that on top too just to keep the moisture in on the surface and avoid getting some you know mold or dampening off issues that can happen with your indoor starts. So the Walla Wallas are 150 days to maturity so that's pretty much the whole growing season that we have outdoors here on the Saskatchewan Prairies. 150 days is would be a good year for us for outdoor growing so that's why these need to definitely be started indoors to get a good jump on that. We're at about 10 weeks right now before last frost so I'm putting them in a little bit earlier but I want to want them to be I want to get a really good start on them before they go outside. If you ever go to the dollar store or superstore these bamboo skewers make great markers for your containers. I've even if they're a little bit too long you can cut them down to size but they fit nice in here. These are also wooden stir sticks they're not very big but a popsicle stick or something like this. When you start seeding into those tiny little seed trays some of these little markers work really good. So I'm just going to sprinkle some soil on top of these Walla Walla seeds and make sure you're if you use the boiling water method that you make sure your soil has cooled down. This is just slightly warm right now which I'm sure the seeds won't mind. I'll just lightly pack it down. So these Cabernets are supposed to be a good storage onion which is something I'd like to be able to do is have a good supply of onions to store for the winter. So now we'll do the early yellow globe. So I used to do just by the onion sets the bulb form from the garden centers and plant them and always found that they never did really produce a very large bulb. I have since learned that onions are a biannual type vegetables so that means they have a two-year period of growth and those onion sets that you buy from the grocery store or the greenhouses are in their second year and because they're in their second year of growth those bulbs are naturally putting most of their energy into the stem and their seeds so that they can you know produce more seeds and are not focused on you know bigger bulbs. So that's one of the reasons why I guess you don't always get a really good sized bulb when you use onion sets. So I'm hoping that I can become a better grower of onions from seeds. Every year I learn a few more things about how to get a bigger bulb and hopefully this year will be better than last year. I'm just going to try and zoom in here on my pansy seeds if you can see those little light brown colored seeds there. That's the pansy seeds that I found today and of course there's a whole bunch of little pieces of dried leaves and such and flowers in the mix here but I'm going to sprinkle it onto a container of moistened soil and see if we can get some germination. So these will probably have to be transplanted. I've also planted up some petunias and snapdragons and once they get past that four leaf stage I will have to separate them and transplant them into different containers and that's what I will do with these pansies as well. We'll see how they turn out. So I've seen a lot of seeds going in there so I think I should have pretty good germination and end up with a lot of pansies. It's nice if you can do this to just help save on costs up from the greenhouse when you go and buy a six pack of any kind of flowers here in Saskatchewan they can be anywhere from you know three to six dollars. So I think you know if you have the space and enjoy starting your own seeds it's totally worth it. So something I forgot to do before I put the dirt in has poked some holes into the bottom here because you want to be able to bottom water these once they start sprouting and growing but it's very easy to cut through this aluminum foil with something like this utility knife here. Put a few slits all along the bottom. You can see I've got a bunch of slits here. So to start off I'm putting this onto a heat mat which will help speed up the germination. If you don't have one you don't have to use one and I also will not be turning on this light I'm just have it on right now just so I can show you what I'm doing but until germination happens they should just remain in the dark. You want to make sure that the surface stays moist and if I had some vermiculite I would be sprinkling that but I'm going to use perlite which is a little bit bigger pieces but it still will work as well. So this will help keep the moisture on the surface and also if the container you're using is something that comes with a plastic dome that would be ideal. I don't have any of those this year and I was just trying to use some different things that I have around my house rather than buying stuff and I'm just going to cover this with a plastic bag just to keep the moisture in and so I don't have to spritz it down as often and I got my pansies here also on the heat mat. See how they do. So anything kind of plastic or dome cover that you can put on this just to keep the moisture in until germination. I just have a big plastic bag here that'll work. I'm just going to push down my sticks here a little bit for now. Just to give it the occasional spritz. Keep it moist on top. Watch for germination. So as soon as you start seeing some germination I will take the plastic off and turn on the grow light. Keep watching for further updates on how my onions are doing here and getting them ready for the outdoor garden season. I'll be doing a lot more seed starting videos over the next few weeks so if you haven't already please subscribe, hit that notification bell so you don't miss out on the next video. Thanks for watching!