Survival Garden: Inexpensive Ideas to Start Seedlings Early

It's time to start your seedlings so that you can get a jump on your garden this year. Hi, I'm Kyleen and I'm the Provident Prepper. I am kind of a crazy garden lady and I love growing our own fruits and vegetables. This year was the first year I ever tried to create an indoor survival garden and it was highly successful. So I would invite you to go check out some of those videos. But today we're going to talk about starting seedlings. There are such a wide variety of ways that you can accomplish this. But of all years this is the best year to start a garden even if you've never done it before. One of the things I'm experimenting with is pop seeds. This is a little garden kit that you can just purchase. They're all heirloom seeds which means that you have the ability to collect seeds from these plants and they will perform true to the parent plant every year. So if you are trying to do a survival garden you really want open pollinated or heirloom type seeds that you can do that not hybrid seeds. So we're going to experiment with some of those and see how well they work. There are a couple different ways that I like to plant the plants. I like to start the seedlings. This is one I've done indoors and this is actually mustard greens. And I just densely plant them into the cup, let them grow, and then I'll separate them one little seedling at a time about when they're this size. Put them in their own individual cups and let them grow to maturity. This is chamomile that I have planted and it's been growing for a little while. But before I actually plant it outside it will be a nice big flourishing plant so that it just really helps me get a good jump on the season. I also planted radishes and it's a crazy because I planted these. What is the date on them? Okay I planted these on the 17th of February. It's March 1st and already these radishes are just growing big and beautiful. But I'm going to do those in my indoor garden. I wouldn't transplant those. So I do something called winter sown and that's where I put soil in the milk carton or any transparent container. I've hinged it, I put the seeds in it, keep it watered, and then I just put it outside in the snow. Like seriously these were started on January 25th. And the thing about winter stone is that the seeds will begin to sprout when they are ready. Now these are some of the pop seeds that I put in here starting on February 17th. So again it's only been just a couple weeks and they are just now starting to sprout. So these sprouted much faster indoors than my winter sown plants sprouted. But it's both an effective way. If you don't have lights indoors or a really nice sunny window or someplace to sprout your plants inside, you know you have options. So check out the winter sown video that we've done to teach you how to do that. If you don't have an indoor light set up we do have a video that will explain our lighting system and show you options for inexpensive LED lights or shop lights or even the grow lights. But yeah there's ways that you can do this very inexpensively and get a great jump on your season. With the onions, with these onions I actually will not transplant them inside. Like remember this one I'm going to take these little plants and I'm going to separate them and let them grow in these cups. Then I'll let them harden off outside for a few hours every day before I permanently transplant them outside. But the onions I plant really densely and then when it when they're nice and tall and it's ready to plant outside I'll just cut them off to about three inches and I will separate them out one at a time and plant them directly into the garden. It works so well and you will get really healthy good bulbs by planting this way. Today we'll also talk a little bit about, this is a more expensive method I think, but these are little peat cups that you can just fill with water and plant in. And then you can get these seedling trays where you put the soil in and plant the seeds. And the plants can't grow very big in here so you're either going to be transplanting them out into the garden when they're small or you will be planting them into larger cups to let them grow. Either way it totally works and we're going to help you see how to get the jump on this season. I'm pretty actually impressed with this garden kit. It uses all heirloom seeds and they are packaged for long-term storage. But I want to try them out. So far the germination rate has been really good which is kind of impressive. But they're new seeds too right? They haven't been on the shelf for 10 years. But PopSeeds has agreed to provide five of these heirloom garden seed kits to our viewers. So if you are interested in being one of the lucky winners just in the comments section put, please enter me for the free drawing for a PopSeed garden kit. And on March 15th we will draw the lucky winners and you will be notified through the comments section of our YouTube channel. If you don't win you can always get these directly from PopSeeds. Just use the promo code PROVIDENT and you'll get a discount. So today while it's snowing like crazy outside I am going to start a lot of my seedlings. Now I already have some done winter sown method and we are going to plant some more of those today. I think it's important to start out by explaining why I would put so many seeds in one cup. This is the perennial chamomile and these little seedlings I'm just going to kind of break them apart. I know it seems a little bit savage you want to be careful but these little guys they are pretty strong and pretty resilient. And so I've got all these little plants just like this that are ready to be transplanted. You want to make sure that you don't do this too young. They need to be a little bit established like these. I could have transplanted these earlier but I just couldn't get to them in time. I always label these cups. The reason I'm these cups they're reusable which I really like. They have holes drilled in the bottom of them and I can use them at least four or five six times before I can't use them anymore. But they were on sale at Costco in the big bag and it had like 249 or something of them for six dollars. So it was a really inexpensive way to be able to meet my needs. This is that garden soil that has been cooked right to 180 degrees. You don't want to cook it beyond that because it can form some different toxins and and we just want this soil to be really clean. Sometimes if I have big pieces of roots I will just leave them out. But I'm going to fill up the cup first. Put a little hole in there and then I'm going to take this sweet little plant and just give it a new home. Package it in here really nicely. Remember while this soil is moist before I ever start I'm going to water this and this soil will sink down a little bit. But it really is just that easy. And then I have a bunch of different containers whatever I can find inexpensively to catch the water. You could theoretically use one cup that is not does not have drills holes drilled in it and just use it like this to catch the water. But I think that this is easier for me because it kind of stabilizes the whole group of them. Especially because these are being put on a wire rack. I have already done that with many of these but I ran out of time that day and so I didn't get it finished. And I have both annual and perennial chamomile because it's a great insectary in the garden as well as a medicinal herb. And then here is some of my little baby stevias that I did this in the same way. So a lot of the plants I will just start and then I transplant them individually allow them to grow nice and big and then they get transplanted out into the yard or into different containers in my indoor garden. That's the same way that I started this celery. As you can see there is not one right way to start your seedlings and we strongly encourage you to do it this year. Start some seedlings. Grow a garden even if it is just one plant in a pot on your porch or a small garden bed or a huge traditional garden. Whatever works for you start today because you're going to make some mistakes and the more you do this the more you'll learn and the better you'll become. And speaking of that that leads us right into the question of the day. What tips do you have for our viewers on your favorite ways to start seedlings or some things that you have learned in the process that might just save somebody else from making some mistakes? Comment below and thanks for being part of the solution.