lovely day in seattle chickens are primed and ready to go so i would say mid august mid august mid august to start to start thinking about what you're going to do for the fall a little warm weather stuff in the ground and now we're just beating the clock into the autumn couple of them you know house and chicken greens for instance and i'm going to need to do a little rotation here pretty soon we're going to plant some brassicas today  preparation for the fall try to get them go in and throw one before the short days broccoli that we planted few weeks ago now to be really crappy seed i mean they came up all right them never seen such wimpy broccoli plants in my life generally generally they were much more robust than that so we're going to give it another try you know that's the secret to green thumb that if you kill the plant plant another one you know we'll ever know they die quietly from out start of a new and keep going we got three out of four land and hold cleo here the nine year old american a blondie here she started presenting this week oh no oh no what she's doing you know she usually quits around july fourth and goes in the mole and she's lost a few feathers but she can't stop losing her feathers i don't know what she's up to like i said to the youngsters here of kind of revitalize the  flock of perked him up psychologically anyway i don't know whether it's a competition and you know they figure they got to keep up with the herd here or there or just kind of stimulates th hormones or something of rock there and i haven't checked today so she's a she's two out of three since she started and that was today you know she's more of a dual purpose breed these two up here on my here are really you know they're hybridized for egg production early production and that's exactly what they've been doing bruce is more of a dual purpose breed and sort of hard rock one of the older breeds in this united states that golden there who's just been foraging and looking for things to eat in the dirt they're all doing good little marie kira started presenting last week in the last week so i expect a little green egg in the nest box and any day you know you're caught as you know they call in the eastern egg loosely called they're actually missing the last vertebrae in the spinal column they don't have a tail true or true eric honestly this is a you know the american version and she's kind of working up lately gives me kind of the pose there that she's not lay anymore but i think she kind of wants to is getting jealous or you give the boy and you know you're playing rooster and they there's a little jealousy between the roosters and the rooster me and the hens they don't like to see the one getting attention oh she just wants to be jealous but you goldie and there's a classic presentation and they'll do it you know kind of when you sneak up from behind them sometimes they'll just do it on their own if you just gently put your hand down especially when they're in full lay like this they like the tail rub on that because stimulates suction rosie you want some to around and lose more time fooling with the chickens i tell you should be getting work done here i am playing with the girl on top dry but down deep dry a source affect everything to go to the side you know like your weedy patches you know on the side where it's not getting water any drought stressed plants will start getting spider soil put up this one is basically one leaf if they're not blooming and you know this guy came up early and i think he's he's been fairly well watered by i think he's just ready to go dormant  this particular species you know when they are starting to go dormant they start to pull energy back down into the bulb start to kind of you know abandon this leaf that they put out every year and this is a perfect  e plant for that that a fence will pick out or the not even the spider mites will pick out specifically oh it's weakening it's starting to lose its energy and as you can see you know this is so typical you know this heavy stippling you know this leaf is what you first see very light step stippling there on the underside generally but they'll start so you know they're sucking juices out of the plant injuring the plant and you'll see the injury from the other side and then this is sort of a progression you know beginning middle and then this is the end stage where they really suck the life out of this plant you also start to maybe see you put your glasses on a little webbing if you look you know it's kind of close down on the leaf but you can see little stuff stuck in this webbing here in the camera probably can't see the wedding itself but you can see evidence how the stuff's kind of sitting on top of this webbing you need a glass to really see the you know like fifteen or thirty power loop you know of some sort and then you can get down there and you're going to see the two spotted my and their larvae crawling around and you know on a leaf like this you're only to see maybe  and they do get everywhere and seek out the weaker plants but the reason i've pulled this guy out is because as soon as i see a heavy infestation like this this time of year and the first thing i see is look for these little black dots here on a spider mite infested plant and sure enough and again the predator is very small in fact i found an adult down here that's how big the adult is it's  a ladybird beetle all black and as you can see it's just about the size of the head of a sewing pin not even a push pin or a map pin it's a very small little b you need a loop to find them they are active fliers and they will actively seek out the the prey item which in this case is the spider mites these little dots on top of from the larval stage and we'll hash out to the adult beetle here hopefully soon and start multiplying and start cleaning these up i have i've had great success in the greenhouse some years where i knew i was having problems i knew everything would go dormant or you know i could you know come winter the aphids or the spider mites tend to start disappearing because they don't like cold they don't like wet specifically the low humidity is there optimum environment because they can breathe through their skin the low humidity allows accelerated transpiration for them respiratory so they can really go nuts here so later in the year old certifying these and i just let him go  let him you know just plants kind of going to go dormant anyway so i'm not going to treat this with incas so for you mean oil or any kind of thing like that because i really want i've been very strenuously trying to  develop this population of the stuff through spiegel so that i have more of them in the garden hopefully they'll start showing up a little earlier in the season but of course they're not going to show up without a prey item you know these are the lions and without the zebra s they don't show but now they're showing up and it's a really cool thing they can both the adults and the larvae do eat the spider mites and they do a pretty darn good job they don't completely wipe out the species you know the pretty speeches the spider mites you know just like the lions don't completely wipe out the zebra but you know they do a pretty good job of cleaning up some of these more severe infestations end up with a very strong wintergreen smelling thing and i was doing experiments with you know soaking little cotton balls and hanging them around the garden trying to attract these guys or and other things like them you know things like green lace wings  it's funny because you can see you can tell particularly right here we've got a very strong batch peppers compared to you know all the others so this this whole beds doing pretty good this beds doing all right but this particular batch is doing really good and it's funny because it was sort of some of the weaker more malformed seedlings at first but i was checking if i can stay what's kind is this these are all my goldfish peppers  i'm trying to stabilize the genetics it's a it's a mix between fish pepper mushroom pepper some new mexican pepper is in there and then finally you know it they crossed with my ball gary and carrot peppers and got this to orange color it turns out that these stellar examples are the one that did so well last year that had exactly the qualities i was looking for it had a very golden orange not it was more yellow orange a new mexican morphology in the for root and kind of a medium to hot heat level and this beautiful face shaped plant multiple branches and good set on the  you could see were start to see sort of that wrinkled new mexican which i'm after i have i don't know what color they are yet but so far so good i'm seeing that you know the fruit there is a nice example that i'm looking for and they the other qualities i'm looking for lots of blooms lots of fruits nice big plant so these guys for whatever reason the other their seedlings the pepper i collected last year  produced some subpar seed the seeds weren't fully developed so i think they had a little hard time getting germinated out of the ground and you know they didn't have much energy stored up in that seed so they were sort of weak seedlings but you can see that the strength of the genetics is  on the base shape up here is it's top heavy no problem we've got steaks and this time of year generally i you know get the three about a three foot right for peppers unless they get really ba not like it takes much support you know you just don't want to fly up and down when it rains or when the winds come up or when just it just simply gets too heavy with for hopefully i'm going to want to stake all these on you know like this guy and you know it always starts out with just doing a few that are kind of in trouble and then by the end of the year and i'm pretty much got a steak on almost one just for just on general principle going to you know you can see you know if you're following week after week you can tell that these guys are really starting to grow like crazy they're you know they're covering one of these six inch meshes per day you know as far as the growth of kind of weaving them in and out of this trial it's you know using a little velcro strap but i just i only have to use one per plant basically because they'll start tenderly you know they'll grab hold of that wire sometimes i help them like that and they'll strap themselves in as you can see and they're also going in and out so i only just keep moving that velcro and kind of make sure that they're making it through they're also starting to branch this point so we've got both the main branch and then we're starting to get these side shoots again we've had a lot of these male flowers developing and  so that's the female flower you know that's going to be the fur you know that's where the seeds develop so you know this is the female portion and you know all these little guys with nothing at the base those are the male flowers  it's very typical to form a lot of male flowers before you get the females you know the plant needs the energy to develop female flowers and make that happen now here's a little lesson i had a couple extra plants of this that i clannad along the spence line and i was going to let him kind of grow up and over onto this wall just for kicks off on the side don't let your chickens near the squash plants  this plant was about i don't know four feet long a couple days ago kind of crawling along the fence and they got two of them stretching their little necks through the wire there so they found out they like squash plants a lot sorry chickens get whatever they want but keep them out you cucumber stukas they you know same family they like those and again these guys are just exponentially grow grow grow and they you know once a day i'll come back just kind of suggest where they might want to go and i don't know if they really argue with me i'm not going to you know fight them too much but i try to keep them on the trailer so that the one road doesn't fall into the other and start choking each other out now these guys two are really starting to branch out you can see all these guys running along the edge here are new branches off the main branch and again here i've got just tons of these little branch lets every year i know at this stage of the year i realize that i should only plant you know maybe and two and then let that front row get on to the third string like this because this happens every year this year i'm thinkin i may just erect like sort of a temporary  secondary thing here for the side branches or i might just since i don't really have anything planned for this bed i might just let him sprawl and do some horizontal branches out getting pollination here pretty soon and i would say that within the next week here i should start to see some you know the first gherkins coming off the plant the corn has really enjoyed the recent hot weather you know we had some record temperatures there last weekend and you know talk about you know hearing the corn grow at night these this stuff really started taking off and i actually thought i might have seen on here at some point  obviously we've got the male toxins going with the years and are a little behind but i think we're still got plenty of season in which we can pull this off right with plants not real quick