you know you turn around in your game in four minutes per day a day like that adds up pretty quickly and start looking at the calendar and counting back from last frost and suddenly you realize you're behind already you're already out of space you're already behind while we were windy this weekend you know i was out enjoying some sunshine at work and five minutes later i looked out the window and it was snowing heeling sleeting thundering and lightning you know being bashful today take refuge under the cherry sunlight under our eyelids and onto the little sprouts so today was going to be peak planting and i thought i don't have to come up with anything else for the show which is just plant my next couple days so let's just take a little look at what we've got going on here i've got five different varieties and that's sixteen inches apiece double for this one we're ready to plant so i've also got three rows going and that is so they're easier to work when you're reaching in and a lumber hall comes in that kind of space and you know it's a typical stud space and so a lot of done here is it taking a reasonably straight pieces of wood and just kind of run it between my use opinion i kind of respect who claims that pieces are actually wimps as far as planting depth goes he said don't plan him so deep so i'm going to go just a little shallower here but i'm probably still going down you know half an inch three quarters here and let's check our soil temperature while we're at it a ball me forty two forty four degrees about two inches down that's pretty good and i actually checked it last twenty four hours and it does get it did get down to forty at night but that's as low as it goes and that's about when you start planting peace i've already counted all my peas out of got a tag let's see what we plant morning they've imbibed quite a bit of water they're still crunchy or not soft and that's right where you want them is some i used to do  back in the day and i kind of fell out of the habit but i'm going to try and just to give and give them all jump start as far as the germination to get them wet and getting warmed up down on the lap and i used to actually sprout them first just intel i saw the very first little radical root coming out but you know i don't know if this will do great so i did was i missed them just a little bit just to get some water on the outside and then of course we're going to lagoon that does it it's the bacteria that inhabits the roots the lagoon produces nodules in the roots because the chemical reaction demands an anaerobic environment so what they do is they they in capsule eight this bacteria in little nodes on the roots which you can see if you polled p plant or a bean plant you'll see those little little pebbly looking things on their roots and what they're doing is they're in compassing that bacteria produce this fix nitrogen out of the atmosphere so there's the reaction you can't use too much of the stuff perfectly harm us i want to be making a sandwich out of it but it's not going to hurt you with beneficial bacteria and  so you plant them tight it helps them climb you know when they're tight like that and these will get to travel us but they like to kind of cling to each other too especially in the early days of their development i always say if they're too tight we can't bend on but i never have not  well here it will get up tomorrow and we'll be off to the races now those are the party shelling p that i've been dealing with and following them closely but i'll wait a week it's going to be the  quickly the greenhouse which is starting to take shape for the spring transplanting season can come out of the rain like what i've done here as i've said continue to add these black and plastic jugs full of water thermal mass got enough yet another row in and what's happening here is there it's sort of taking an organic architecture here where these jugs are just about perfect for putting a flat on as you can see so i'm good put yet one more row down here just a single saw has stepped cheers here in the back wall and then in the crowd i'm going to get a double row just single so i'm not shading back here and so they can get two flats deep in front here this has started with the extra water in here this really has started to be a good little unit i was holding you know thirty eight degrees this won't have to be running the peppers in and out every morning maybe this year me so cancel that order went to another seed company to get their new grafting stock that i'm looking for it's getting pretty late those what i'm going to do here is i'm going to do a little insurance policy  we've been growing on the maxi fork rootstock what happens is you grow your heirloom tomatoes over here you're grafting a root stock which is a highly disease resistant root stock over here and  chop the top off the heirloom chop the top off of the root stock put a heirloom top onto the root stock so i've been using the maxi for which is a very vigorous vine very strong root stock but  doesn't seem to have a timeline it's made for greenhouses where you've got sort of a perpetual thing going and i've had issues with not ripening it just continues to grow and grow and set fruit but it doesn't seem to want to write been in this climate in time so the beauford is supposed to be more appropriate for the heirloom outdoor production and that's what we're waiting for but in the meantime  now that timing is important on the graph and you need to make sure that the diameters i use a straight graft straight cut graft so i just take a razor blade and go straight across your rootstock there with the clip holding them together so the obviously the diameters need to be very close to each other now tomatoes do have a serve a taper to the stem so you can kind of adjust a little bit depending on where the cut goes but the closer they are in diameter the better off you're going to be so  seedling the germination can be you know even though it's the germination is good it can be spread out over a longer period of time the seedlings can sometimes take a little while to get going one thing you'll notice is you know here's here's the root stock seed and you can kind of see how small those are in fact here i'll take one of these there's no way i'm going to mix them up you know you compare that with one of these get these started first now i have in full might strategy these days is to start one of these start two of these a few days you know like five days later in the star another one you know fifteen days same thing with the heirlooms kind of happens staggered that way one of them is going to catch up to the other is kind of what i've been doing i only need keeps where and i'm going to go down to two plants i think this year i'm going to bite the bullet i keep saying that i keep a plant in you know sixteen a for last year i think i was down to  ok i had ten on two towers and that was too many when you start running into issues with air circulation around the leaves which leads to problems with the late blight if they're not getting the right near circulation and they can dry the leaves off and that's prime condition for the fungal infections at the end of the season so this year too i only need two and to get that of course i'll plant about you know a one hundred tomato seeds because you will find when you're grafting if you don't do it every day for a living you know it's you blow a few i do recommend  growing plenty for practice here so tomatoes tiny seeds these are gone you know just and maybe i meet them in steep now the root stock i'm planting one seed per  and because you know i'm going to be grafting these to the root stock so i'm going to keep those individual whereas this top is quick we'll do one per for those because they want to nice strong bottom for these plants prince just so you know i'll get a variety of sizes and this when i'm guaranteed that i have plenty of things to chop up and again you know too deep so i try to you know last year i ran a little late you know if you figure eight weeks back from mother's day or last frost or whatever you want to plant out count back eight weeks for normal tomatoes where you're not grafting and i'd add a week i'd add two weeks for grafting if you're going to do that because once you chop these things obviously the plants going to be a little distressed you need to tempt them and actually put them in a put produce bag you know a clear plastic bag over the top of the plant with the stick to keep the plastic from jiggling the plant and you keep them kind of to the side of the light bench and in a high humidity environment like that for about ten days waiting for the acclimate them back to full light full fertilizer water that sort of thing and then wait another week or so you know once the stem starts pushing against that clip then you'll very carefully remove it and i do mean carefully but once it's scarred over the the they are amazingly tough you know that it's just like any other scar tissue you know it almost becomes tougher than the rest of the plant and it does grow with plant so it's you know you've got a week or two of sort of danger zone and then you can go from there and treat them like any other states a few years ago in a very astute viewer actually turned me on to it i had heard about it core times but it prints and you know it's i actually noticed that once the company is actually offering grafted plants this year for probably not a bad price when you consider what goes into it they were actually offering even double gras so you've got one airline you know two different heirlooms and one root stock  and prevents water from getting up into the plant i was having problems with it for a couple years before and that's why i've gone to this technique you know the plant will wilt in the noonday sun even though the waters the soil is well watered and that's when you know you've got a problem these have performed beautifully correcting that problem so it's something you might want to look into  all right well i guess all kind of roll credits here you can e mail me if you want the real garden at yahoo dot com that's all one word in lower case you can also call me after the show and listen for the phone after the tuesday evening show but hey the you know the message machine is always on give me a call the message and i'll get back to you also visit that new web site w w w dot the real garden dot com and put some new every weekend and appreciate a comment if you do visit