I know, I know, it is too early to plant…and I learned my lesson last year when I had 4′ tomatoes in my living room in April. I promise I am not starting too early this time!

What I have planted is our Canna Lillies. In the fall, I collected all sorts of seed pods from our flowers once they had dried out. I did the same thing last year and was able to supplement what we bought, with ones that we had grown.

The only issue that I ran into was that I didn’t start them early enough, so they were quite small when I put them out and then they took a while to get to a decent size. But boy were they beautiful and full of blooms once they got there.

This year, I know I will need to buy to supplement again, but I am hoping that starting a bit earlier will result in some larger plants and some earlier flowers.

I started the process on boxing day. While relaxing and watching TV, I sat and cut little holes in the hard outer shells of all of the seeds. I have done this using nail clippers as I have found it to be the best to get through that hard shell, but I have a different plan for next year. My thumbs felt dislocated by the time I finished, mostly due to holding the tiny, slippery, seeds tightly so that I didn’t clip my fingers.

I saw a video with someone using a little sanding disk with a dremel and it made quick work, and they had control to stop once the pith (not sure if this is the correct term, but the white, soft inner part of the seed) was showing.

Once I had the little spots on all the seeds opened up, I soaked them for a few weeks, until I had little shoots coming out of the seeds. Some of them had a good size shoot, while others just had an emergence of the shoot. I, of course, forgot to take pictures of this step.

On Jan 12, I purchased some really great seed starter soil from a local nursery, their own special blend, and got to planting the seeds. I decided to do 3 seeds per pot as I did last year. It worked out well. The big difference this year, is I didn’t plant all the same colour seed in the pots. Instead, I planted a variety of colours so that when I plant them outside they end up being really colourful little groupings.

On Jan 21, the first shoot emerged from the soil. It’s always such a happy moment when something you plant pops out of the soil.

As of Jan 27, about half of the seeds have sprouted. My gut feeling is that the yellow colour is mostly up since they had the longest sprouts from the seeds, with some pink starting. The red with yellow tips will likely be the last, if they come u pat all. They had the smallest sprouts and the smallest seeds.

I hope that all the pots end up with at least a couple flowers started, but we will see how it all goes. Its nice to see something in our little greenhouses. They will have another month and a bit before any other plants need to be started, so they should have a good while basking in the greenhouse heat.