No-Fail Cheap Winter Sown Greenhouse for Starting Onions

Today I'm going to show you how you can use trash to start your seedlings outdoors without babysitting them, without any lights, and for really, really cheap. Hey Provident Preppers! Let me show you what I have going on here. These are actually a whole bunch of different things that I have planted for my spring garden and they needed to be cold stratified. So this is the best way to start seeds that need to be cold stratified because they're out here in the cold. These get snowed on, they get rained on, they get sunshine. They're just able to let nature take its course and sprout these seeds. Today we are going to plant onions. Now these I started in early January because of the cold stratification process that was required but my onions, I start them using winter sown because this method allows them to start really early and I don't have to babysit these. I put these jugs out here and I don't worry about them at all unless we go through a real dry spell and then I'll do something. But let me show you how I do this. Now with the winter sown method you need any kind of transparent container that you can cut and hinge it. Other containers will work. I have seen where people have taken clear totes and done this in clear totes. You've got to make sure that you have ventilation. So you'll notice that none of the lids are on here. If you were to put the lid on here it would fry the plant. So what we do is we leave the lid off, we cut it so that it's hinged, and then we have to put drainage holes in the bottom of each of these so that this little seeds don't die. We just create these containers and then we plant our seeds. Last night I made a little bit of compost tea and I put the onion seeds in here to soak overnight. Now my onion seeds are a little bit old. Onion seeds don't tend to last really long. These are from about 2019-2020. So I'm actually over, I put more seeds in than I need to use because I'm expecting the germination rate to have declined. But by soaking them overnight it should actually help increase my germination rate. So I've got three different kinds of onions and onions are a fabulous thing to winter sow because it makes them so happy to be out in the sunshine and nature just does their work. They can be snowed on or rained on or whatever and you don't have to worry about these jugs unless it starts to dry out. If you don't have any moisture in the air for a few weeks you might need to go in and water them. But we've had fantastic success with this. I have all my seeds drained so now I've just got my soaked seeds on these plates. Here, do you see how these are hinged? It's so nice. I filled these most of the way to the top with moistened potting soil. Super important that you moisten it before you put in here because if you don't it has a really hard time of absorbing enough water and then the seeds get everywhere. So just take some time. I put it in here and I put some water and I stirred around and I moisten it and then I filled all these containers and you'll notice they're draining nicely. And so now my job is just to sprinkle these onion seeds on the top and I'm actually, remember these probably are going to have not the best germination ever. So I'm going to do it fairly thickly and then when I go to plant these I just pull them apart and you'll see that. I'm sure you've seen me do it on other videos. And then I'm going to put more potting soil so that I just, I don't want to make them too deep. So just like a quarter of an inch, an eighth of an inch on the top. Make sure that it's all moistened in and then I'll show you how I close these. Okay, so these are all tucked away and planted in these little jugs. You notice that I use different kinds. So there are soda bottles, there are milk jugs, there are half-gallon milk jugs, and there's juice bottles. You can use anything that's transparent, right? You just need to make sure that you've got this hole in the top. Now one of the problems that I've had in the past when I labeled them with a permanent marker is the sun tends to fade it. So what I've done this time for an experiment is I just put clear tape over the top and I'm hoping that might help it so that the weather doesn't make it all disappear. These are going to go on the south side of my house. We have a problem with our dog. She loves to take these and tear them apart. So we put them in an area where she's not allowed. Right there against that south-facing wall, it's a little bit warmer, which helps more with germination. It's protected from the wind so that the wind can't blow these jugs away. But they, I just can ignore this and probably in about six weeks, I'm going to go out there and open this up and I'm going to have all kinds of wonderful green plants. Now as soon as I've done that, what I'll do is I'll want to actually harden them off. So I'll just unhinge this and let it have more air and more breeze. Finally, and I might even cut the whole top off depending on what the weather is like and let them hang out there for a little while before I plant them in the garden. And this is a great way to start onions. It's so economical because onion seeds are a lot less expensive than the bulbs. And I personally think that they perform better. And if you go to the nursery and buy them, then you're paying somebody else to do this work when it didn't take me that long. And it's, it's going to be amazing. You just watch and see how wonderfully successful it is. So for the question of the day today, how's your early spring planting going? And what are you doing to make sure that you have plenty of food to eat this summer? Comment below. And thanks for being part of the solution.