 Alright, this is us, this is our family episode of Most of the Living Ants. Today I'm just going to kind of take you guys through the process that we're using to get some of our seeds started to plant our outdoor garden. So it's just the beginning of April here and our last frost date or safe frost time is usually about mid May. I'm trying to get about four to six weeks started early here on our seedlings before we get those moved outside. One of the things that I never liked about gardening and getting into gardening is every time we expand our garden or start new gardens it seems like we're always investing a whole bunch of money. You know there's potting soils and seedlings starting kits and you know peat plugs and all this other stuff that we need to get seems like to get gardening started. So this year I'm going to do a series on how we're trying to focus on doing this for as little money as possible and even free in most cases. So one of the things you know just kind of starting off when you're getting all your seed started there's a lot of products out there you can buy that are fairly expensive, a lot of trays and seed starting kits and all that good stuff. One of the things we found to work really well is just to save up these all kinds of different containers. So throughout the year we'll save these little plastic containers. This one had some type of salad or something like that and all these old cape containers ending with a clear top on it that kind of acts like a little greenhouse and then containers different size containers to plant the seeds in. Even little ones like this that are shallow will work just fine for shorter rooting plants especially if they're not going to be in their very home. So this will work for starting some smaller ones as well. We've got little tomato or sorry strawberry containers here that we're using as well. These ones have slots or holes in the bottom where the water can drain out. So we have those in the lid of another plastic dish here. And as you can see we've got a large cake container here that we've got set up and as you can see it's got a lot of moisture built up in it. So we just get the seeds all moist and the dirt all moist in there and then this acts like a little mini greenhouse keeps them warm and gets those seeds started really well. You can also use things like egg cartons. You can keep these open and maybe get a clear plastic dome or something to set over the top of it, cut the lid part off. This will work good for really small like lettuces or kale or spinach and any of the small like leafy greens that don't have really extensive roots. They can work in little cells like this. Same with these. There's also these clear more fancy egg cartons that you can use. I guess these have a plastic lid on the top so these will work as well. So there's lots of different things you can use. The SSL kids made these little chalkboard pots last year. We've got a bunch of these. This just made out of a sour cream container and poles drilled in the bottom of it and then using the lid as like a little water catch here. These work great for starting, you know, these are real deep so you can start larger rooting things like pumpkins and cucumbers and tomatoes and that and then you can just cover them with a dome or something like that as well. So lots of different options out there to get started. We're just using an old shelf and from a window here. So we're not using any grow lights or not using any electricity. Just trying to stay as simple as possible. This window doesn't even get that much sunlight. It probably only gets like four hours of sunlight a day but it's in a warm location and the seed seemed to be sprouting there just fine. So I'll take in and kind of show you what I'm doing for the seed starting dirt and then we'll just show you how all it's working so far. Okay, so this is the soil mixture that we're using and basically what I do every year is we just at the end of the year when our compost is all finished up outside, you know, throughout the summer we're throwing stuff in it and keeping it turned and all that kind of good stuff and by the end of the year we've got a really nice fine base of compost. So this is mostly compost. There's also I grabbed a few shovel foals of the squareful garden mix that we made last year which is got some more compost and manures in it and some peat moss, some spagum peat which is nice to keep the soil really loose. So this is just kind of a random mixture. I think there's some worm castings in here not very much but very little bit of worm castings as well. There's also a lot of larger sticks and stuff like that that I'm trying to kind of pull out as I go through the mix here because we don't want any of those larger pieces of mulch that I threw in there last year and other things like leaves. So just kind of clean that stuff up and keep the finest material but you could use anything. I mean you can even, if you'd grab the spagum peat moss for a gigantic bag of it I think it was like $8 and that can go a really really long way. So if you stretch that out you can get quite a bit of use out of that. The bag that I had here we've had for two years and I just add a little bit at a time to different garden beds and stuff. Very very inexpensive and really could be potentially free soil starting mix here and this has been working really good. All I'm doing is just filling up our container. This is a little to go container of some sort and just kind of making it a nice loose mixture here and I'm going to plant some sunflowers in this. This here I'm trying to do a giant sunflower farm kind of thing and you can see there's a lot of larger pieces in here and we have to sort through a little bit. Okay so in this case I'll probably do like a kind of a ring pattern here and just spread these out a couple inches at a time around the edges and then maybe just pop two in the middle. And I usually put two seeds in every hole just for good measure. Seeds are cheaper and so that's usually not a big deal. Now one of the things that we did this year is I always look around for seeds. Look around after the gardening season or even throughout the winter and in this case our local ACE hardware has a whole rack of 50% off seeds that were from last year actually. So we're utilizing those as much as possible and getting all of our seeds for a very very inexpensive. Now if you want to do this completely free of course you just need to save your seeds from last year. But some of your sunflower's go to seed and save some of those or any other vegetables that you're trying to grow and then you don't need to buy seeds at all after your first year. So that's pretty much it for that and we'll go ahead and just have a little bit of water. Okay so now in this case in particular I don't have holes popped in the bottom of this tray and you can do that if you want to to make sure if you add too much water that it's able to drain out and it also makes it easier if you want to water from the bottom by throwing up like a little tray underneath it and letting the water kind of seep up into the pot. But in this case I'm just being careful is to how much water I add and I'll be careful not to over water it and then with the little greenhouse lid over the top of it here it'll keep all that moisture in so I shouldn't have to add too much water until the seeds are sprouted and can kind of take that water up as I need to. So I'm not worried about having holes in the bottom and that should do it for that. Now once these grow we're not working with some pretty little seed starters and so we don't have you know they're not all in their own individual little sections. So you know once these grow up you're just basically going to take your fingers like this kind of make a claw and just scoop right around it and pull pop it out and go ahead and transplant that outside into your garden after your last frost. So I'll show you how we're working with these in the windowsill and kind of show you the progress of some of the ones we planted a few days ago. Okay so in this case we just have this is just one of our little seed locations where you've got another window that will be adding some more to but this is just a small little cheap plastic shelf we have laying around and this is where we're kind of putting everything right now. We use the same operation last year and we're able to get really good germination rates. So but this is all the random containers doesn't look pretty but it's going to work and it works very well. So I'll just kind of show you this is something that we planted some real tomatoes two days ago and we've already got let's see at least one two three four five about six of them popping up there and this little little seed starting operation so this is doing really well and like I said this does not get a whole lot of sun. I don't think it's sun for a few hours a day and it's still working really well. So I'm going to keep we'll keep doing this now once these sprout up and they're growing pretty well. I'll if there's any gaps I'll go back and poke another hole and try to plant again and make sure we get a full tray of seedlings and once we have a full tray of seedlings we'll kind of set this one aside and take the top off because you don't want to have them in the greenhouse once they once they all sprout so that's pretty much all we're doing here. Well we've got our list of all the plants we need to plant here and I've got quite a bit of work to do so I'm going to keep adding to this operation and try to squeeze as much on the shelf as I can and you know just on this little shelf here we've got over 150 plants planted already so this is just a real small compact and completely free way to get your seedlings and get your garden started. This is going to kind of start a series like I said I'm going to do a lot of other videos of how to start and do some type of free or very inexpensive gardening something that we found to be very helpful to find all these resources out there and I want to share those with you so hopefully found this informational educational in some way please hit thumbs up on the video if you like the ideas share with us some of the ideas that you have how are you doing gardening for less money and I'd love to have you subscribe and follow along for all the upcoming stuff we have in the spring and summer here so as always thanks for watching have a good one.