I hope you guys appreciate this soilless seed starting mix that you can make at home to help save money and keep your garden budget friendly. Hello and welcome to the whole sub-root. This is another edition of Starting Your Garden. So today I'm going to teach you how to easy, simple way to make your own seed starting mix. So this recipe is very simple and easy to follow. You're doing one third of each of the ingredients. So you need something that holds moisture like peat moss or cocoa fiber, something that drains moisture like pearlite or vermiculite, and some type of organic soilless compost. I prefer earthworm castings. They work really, really well. The only other thing you need is some water to hydrate it all and a trial to mix it. So I start out by measuring in my big bowl the measurements aren't to the exact, this is one third, one third, one third, uh, approximately. And it works out that way, just fine. So if I'm using peat moss or cocoa fiber, the very first thing I do is try to break up any of these clumps that I see because those are going to be harder to rehydrate. So I've already gone through and broken up the major clumps. I don't really see any that are so big. There's a few small ones on top. But for the most part I've broken them all up and then I add my water. It takes a lot of water to rehydrate peat. People assume that peat moss will just suck up the water and be fine. But it actually takes a little bit more work than that. So once I've poured that water in, you see the peat moss is floating on top like like cereal floats on milk when you pour it into your bowl. So I have to stir this and get it mixed in and well rehydrated. So as I stir and mix this peat moss, I'm looking for any large pieces of stem that may be in here. Sometimes peat moss does have some bigger pieces in it. And I want to pull out any of those pieces because I like my seed starting mix to be very fine without any obstructions that the seeds might find difficult to pass. So once I have it good and mix that up where it's not really floating much anymore. It's mostly the same. It's about a 50-50 water and peat mix. It's okay that it's really wet. I actually want it to be really wet because that's going to help hydrate my perlite and warm castings as well. So I shake it and dump it into my soil trough. Custom fancy stuff here. It's half a barrel and it's got holes drilled in it so that see that water coming out? That way if my soil that I'm working with is too wet, the water can be drained off. So before that water all drains out of my trough, I want to hurry up and get my perlite added. So I'm going to measure about the same amount as my peat. And I'm going to pour that right on top of the peat and the water and begin mixing it in so that it can be kind of hydrated along with the peat. So once I have that thoroughly incorporated with the peat, I will add my warm castings. All right, then I want to do the same amount of warm castings as everything else. So there we go. I'm going to mix that in thoroughly as well. It's that simple. I'm done. I now have my own custom main seed starting mix. That's got the right moisture content to grow some healthy seedlings. The warm casting adds the nutrients that the seedlings need. One of the big problems I see in a lot of beginning gardeners is that they want to fertilize everything and honestly, you don't need to fertilize your seedlings. Nine times out of 10, they require no fertilization. A good part of that is because there are nutrients in your seed starting mix that are going to provide the right level of nutrition for your little tiny seedlings. And until you pot them up into a bigger pot or transplant them into the garden, they're not going to need any more nutrition than what you've already provided them with your seed starting mix. I want to caution as a personal message to you guys about using non-organic fertilizers. Non-organic fertilizers are actually really, really bad for your plants because they are high in salts and other chemicals. They are bad for you because they contain chemicals that you don't need to have excess of. All fertilization has chemicals, whether it's manure or chemical fertilizer, but the chemical makeup of the chemical fertilizer is different than manure. And it will harm your body, especially if you're dealing with anything that you need to detox from. For somebody like me who's dealing with a lot of health issues caused by toxins in the environment, I strongly caution that you do not add any unorganic fertilizer to your seedlings, especially not miracle grow. And I say that because miracle grow is a company that supports negative impacts on the environment in every way, shape or form. Even if it's organic labeled miracle grow, the company itself does not deserve your money. So please don't support them just like you don't want to support monsano. You don't want to support miracle grow either. Okay, I'm going to step off my soapbox now. Rant over. I hope you guys appreciate this soil-less seed starting mix that you can make at home to help save money and keep your garden budget friendly. I still do highly recommend the Espoma brand seed starter if you're looking for a seed starter that's already made and premixed. I highly recommend it. You can find any of these products on my Amazon storefront and you can start your own seed starting mix yourself. Thank you for watching. Please like, share, comment down below, subscribe if you haven't already and we'll see you next time on Holzermer.