 Greetings friends! This is Survival Doc. Today we're going to talk about starting your own seeds or starting your own plants for your garden from seeds as opposed to buying young plants in the store. Alright, why should you grow from seeds? Alright, for one reason you save a whole lot of money growing from seeds. But I think a more important reason is because you should be saving your seeds if the stores ever sell out of seeds for whatever reason and can't get more in. You're going to be glad that you have been saving your seeds. Alright now let me say first off I'm not against buying young plants in the store and planting them in your garden rather than starting from seeds. A lot of times that's a really good option because when you buy of the young plants you've already gotten like about a month or maybe a two month head start on your plants as opposed to just putting the seed in the ground. I mean you're already two months ahead which really really is a big plus. When you do buy seeds I recommend you buy heirloom seeds. That way you can save your seeds and replant them next year and get the same kind of plant that that you started with. Alright so there may be times you want to buy the plants from the store. There may be times you want to plant your own seeds. Alright this video is about starting from your own seeds. Now there are certain plants that it's just better to go ahead and plant the seed right into the ground. Radishes for example. The plants that germinate very quickly can be planted that way and are probably best planted that way. The other plants that you want to plant before you're able to plant them outdoors, generally what you want to do is you want to plant your seeds about six weeks before the last frost. The last average frost date in the area. That's the date that you can look up for your area. So look up the average last frost date and about six weeks prior to that is as a general rule of thumb when you want to plant to start your seeds indoors. Alright then six six six weeks later the plants should be big enough. It's time to plant them outside. You go ahead and plant them outside and get a head start. Now if you have not done that and it's time to plant them outside and all you've got is seeds then you might be better off just going to the store and buying the plants if you can find the plants that you want. Go ahead and buying the plants because that way you've got about a month or two head start which can make a big difference in the amount of food that you're going to get from the plants that you're planting. Here are just some of the options that you have for starting your seeds. Of course you can use any kind of pot. You can use clay pots and sometimes I do use clay pots. But these when I buy it when I buy the plants from the store they come in these things right here often and so what I'll do is I'll buy at least six of these and I'll go ahead and get a tray like this from the store and these are very convenient to start your seeds in and being in this tray right here when it comes time to take your little plants outside to so they can get adjusted to being outside you don't have to pick these up individually you can just take the whole tray like that and that's some the advantage of the tray. But anyway these are recycled these are from plants that I bought and then and then I just washed them with a water hose high-pressure water hose. Here's another one same thing these are little pots that I saved in a tray. Notice the different colors that's nice if you can get different colors because what I'll do is I'll plant like a certain type of plant in a particular color and that way sometimes a little tab that I stick in there identifying the plant sometimes if that tab gets lost then if I have a bunch of these yellow ones with a particular plant that I know then I'll then I'll know that well this one here that lost its marker it's probably the same one that's in the other yellow ones see here I have some purple ones some white ones and some green ones so I keep these together like that just so if I'm gonna plant you know three or even more of a particular type I'll try to keep them in the same color not necessary here's another recycled one these are like the four inch pots and when I buy these I buy enough so I can go ahead and pick up a tray with them so these didn't cost me anything all right you can also buy these these are some that I bought this is the same thing we're just looking at before these things cost about two dollars for an entire set of six of these it's like two dollars for the tray two dollars for a set of six of these and it's three dollars for the plastic cover that goes on top of it now the the cover is nice because when you're growing these indoors it helps maintain the humidity in there which helps to see germinate a little bit better and then when your seed comes up through here then you go ahead and take the top off but it just kind of protects sometimes when you're growing these inside we keep the temperature in the house kind of cool but it helps maintain the more steady temperature and maintains the humidity and just helps the seed germinate quicker and I mix up my own soil for starting the seeds in that's another way to save a lot of money plus you get exactly what you want in your soil I've already mixed this up here you're stirring it stirring it for here this is ready to go all right so what I did is I started with vermiculite vermiculite is very good to add to your starting mixture because it retains the moisture in the soil real good and I've already mixed it in here the vermiculite the vermiculite are these white these white pieces that are in here they're all natural they're organic all right according to some instructions some you put one part vermiculite and one part peat some instructions say one part vermiculite two parts peat some say one part vermiculite one part peat one part compost I started with the bag here I wanted to use two part two parts peat so once I dumped this in there in my cart here then I took this and I filled it with this peat moss twice and making sure I broke up all the little pieces you don't need big chunks in there you want to break it up as fine fine as possible when you're when you're planting seeds so I filled this up twice dumped that in here and also added a bag I filled this bag up with some compost and I also threw in some a couple of shovelfuls of rabbit manure because I've got it rabbit manure is really good and I have it so I decided to use it it's not necessary now rabbit manure is manure that you can add directly to your garden will not burn there some in yours like chicken manure cow manure horse manure you need to let it rot for about a year before you add it to your garden otherwise it could burn it so be careful if you add manure make sure you know what you're doing but I did put a little rabbit manure in there another thing I added to my mixture was beneficial bacteria this is the one that I used here it contains the bosom formula now you can get other brands this just happens to be one one that I used here normally I buy this in a much larger bag last time I bought this it was in about I think a 20 or 30 pound bag on that was the spread and in my entire garden and what I did was what last time I tell my garden I put a whole large bag of the beneficial bacteria over the soil sprinkled it over soil sprinkled a whole bag of the trace minerals that I'm going to talk about here in a minute I'll sprinkle that over and one plus a manure and I tell that all into my garden so it's very important to have the beneficial bacteria and it's very important to have the trace minerals a lot of times some our soil has been overworked and sometimes the soil is certain areas is just deficient in trace minerals trace minerals are very very very essential trace up minerals are rocks they're not like vitamins that you can produce and that plants can produce if the minerals are not in the soil they are they are not going to be in the food trace minerals are extremely important for your health and they're also important for the health of your plants and a lot of times the diseases that plants suffer from are actually they're susceptible to certain diseases because there may be certain minerals certain trace minerals that are deficient in the soil and the minerals I'm going to talk about the minerals here in a minute there'll be a hundred about a hundred different little trace some minerals that I'll be adding to the soil but getting back to the beneficial bacteria here on the back you can see here's a list of the different back is that bacteria that's in there's whole list of beneficial bacteria over here and over here a lot of times the soil is a deficient in bacteria it could be deficient in bacteria for a lot of reasons one reason being just overworking of the soil but especially if the soil has ever had any type of chemical poisoning in it you know even fertilizer a lot of things will kill the beneficial bacteria in your your soil could be deficient in the beneficial bacteria the beneficial bacteria in the soil is extremely important because beneficial bacteria clings to the roots of the plants and the beneficial bacteria is what allows the plants to absorb the trace minerals that are in the soil so you can have very a lot of good trace minerals in the soil but if you don't have the beneficial bacteria in the soil then you are going to your plants are not going to be able to use that those those minerals very well so one thing you want to add I add to my starter here but also add to my garden is going to add beneficial bacteria and you also want to add trace minerals and the trace minerals I'm going to add are contained about them know about a hundred different trace minerals and I'll talk about the trace minerals in a minute here these are the trace minerals I like to add to my garden as a might a through z minerals micronize very good don't get hung up on brands you may be different different brands available where you are this one comes from Utah and I'm in Missouri so I assume that this one gets across the country you won't micronize the smaller the particle size the easier it's going to be to for your plants to use it by this and 44 pound bags as a might here's what the as a might looks like as you can see it's a extremely fine almost baby powder fineness and I put about two scoops it's my little little shovel here I put about two of these heaping scoops like this in a batch of potting soil that I'm going to show you the seedling starting mixture I'm going to show you here are you want to break sure you get these chunks you want to make sure you break all the chunks because it's going to go into small little containers and it's going to be for starting seeds in your garden that wouldn't be so important but when you're starting seeds in these little small containers you want to break it up as fine as possible mix it up real good all right now and now this is ready to go into my starting pots and what I'll do I'll go ahead and fill the my starting pots and then with additional that I have I'll go ahead and just fill up some of these plastic bags that I've saved just for that purpose and so I store this in a plastic bag so when I need more I don't have to I don't have to do this mixture here more than once or twice a year I don't have to do it every time I just need some just to start some more seeds I just go in here and get the mixture that I've already mixed up very very important to label everything and so this is it has a peat moss I want to take my permanent marker mark out mark out the peat moss and right on here what's in here and I'll have my seed starting mixture all right on here and I might also write it right down the ingredients that I've added but very important when you do something like this that you mark what is in here doesn't take but a minute this is where I start my plants this is a shelf I built out of two by fours I put it in front of a south-facing window you wouldn't know it right now because it's nighttime but this is a south-facing window and this is the one to where I get the most sun all right these are bread trays that I just picked up out of the state cell aluminum bread trays and I built the shelf here to fit these these trays these trays are really convenient because when you water your plants the water is collected in here and so it doesn't run all over everything in your house plus if you have one of these trays filled and you want to take their plants outside you can just take the whole tray and you can take the plants out one tray at a time to harden them off also if you water your plants too much the water will collect in the trays here again without running all over your house and then your your plants can wick the moisture back up from these trays so very convenient if you can get a hold of these for fairly cheap and one more thing I'll mention before I end this video is don't forget to harden your plants off all right now because plants grown inside are not challenged by by the wind or breezes and so they grow very very weak long spindly very weak stems and you've probably noticed that for plants grown indoors the way you can make your plants to grow a stronger stems when it's indoors actually get a little fan blowing a really light breeze across your plants some if not constantly at least a few hours each day have a little fan not blowing them too hard but just a little fan it's just a little light breeze blowing across your plants that'll help them grow a stronger stem and then very important you want to harden them off outdoors as soon as you're able to and when the plants get a certain size and you're you're getting ready to take them outside and plant them in a few weeks just take the whole tray and when you have a nice day outside where temperatures are above well above freezing just pull out the whole tray of plants and take it outside let them sit start off you don't want to start off with too much sun just start them off with just maybe an hour or two of Sun and then take it back inside when temperatures drop at night and then the next day take them out for a few hours of Sun and gradually increase the amount of Sun that they get and that way your plants will grow they'll get challenged by the breeze and they'll start getting adjusted to the Sun they'll grow very strong stems and then they'll be ready when you take them outside to transplant in your garden Cascos came in the last time I bought some it's nice little plastic container when I get something like this have a real hard time recycling it or throwing it away rather than recycle I like to reuse things like this but those among you who are on a budget want to spend less money on them containers something like this is very good I've heard people also use an egg cartons to me egg cartons are too small just right here it's just a perfect size you fill your soil in here you plant your seeds in here of course you close it down you got nice little greenhouse effect in here light goes through your plants grow then when you get ready to transplant them you don't worry about taking out the whole thing you just kind of scoop out take a tablespoon or something just scoop out your plant and plant it in the ground just like that trying to disturb the roots as little as possible now if you do something like this what you want to do is want to poke a hole in each one of these for some ventilation and also poke a couple of holes in the bottom to for drainage but anyway you know be creative and reuse things like this I reuse things like this all the time great little seed starter put that in your in your house in your window start your seeds wonderful idea