clouds did roll in and it didn't rain despite the weather predictions of beautiful thunderstorms last suns of last night but spectacular not every day the sunset makes the morning news this one made the morning new how good it was the lightning mixed in my goodness that might explain some of those buckshot holes in your pepper leaves there spider mites showing up on the fringe of the garden where i don't water spider mites love it hot and dry especially when the plants are hot and dry they'll be all over that i notice them on some alexanders that grow on the edge here that are healthy and beautiful in the on there they found slow drive plant and the spider mites right on the fringe there and you know normally spider mites won't show up till august well hello sweetie but you know we're having such a dry hot summer everything's in an advanced stage including insects also some saw some little threat be thing that interested i'm going to sign last year never did quite identify what it was i get the glass out that's what i did start turning leaves over and the the spider mites you'll see speckling on the top of the leaf but that's from the bugs sucking the juices you identify of course you can go to the extension sites online and find some great ideas by d t's and that will flow charts to help you figure out which one thing you're looking at very useful the girls are weathering the heat all right they're panting and you know in the shade a lot of girls don't seem to be suffering too that i think it's because they're except the rosy here they're kind of skinny layer breeds the seem to do better in the  plants are now starting to lodge now that they're growing their lodge and that's when they fall down oh they you know victims of their own success that one but they're looking to you know they get a little top heavy little rain or a little breeze comes by and they start  a real problem on the farm you know if you've got forty acres of lodging corn well bamboo steak will fix it up in my case is over there in the ground almost catching up to the spare bt you know those guys go out in the elements and you have to fight for survival a little bit in june certainly catch up now these guys been in branches there's one start right there just a little so you keep the fruit off of them when these guys get a lot more root space and a little more micronutrients from the soil start branching out more garlic because it hasn't been worked at all for you know nine months you mulched it heavily fertilized it with fish and all that's broken down on in terms of been doing their thing undisturbed so there's always a really good under the garlic but that beds kind of shady back there so i looked at my winter or my winter on my hard neck garlic and it was just about ready to harvest so i went ahead and waited a little bit on the peppers and now we're going to put them in this hard neck  which i've just harvested i got to do it on friday and i didn't know we got a little tiny bit of rain over the weekend and so my rust my garlic res time for it to happen i was just about to pull it out anyway and the soft neck is safe inside away from all this stuff the softness good this year some minor flecking yellow flecking in the leaves but  really it's starting to come around the bleaching of the clothes i think it's starting to have an effect so i have saved as you can see this yard waste containers completely full of the tops i generally usually harvest the garlic whole group stan everything and hang them whole i think it helps with the long jetty of storage and you know finishes the garlic nicely but in this case the fungus the floor going isn't that causes this rust is actually  inside the epidermis of the plant so obviously very hard to treat without killing the plant now theoretically the closer uninfected at least that's what i was getting from the white sheets and theoretically you can plant  use so i've been kind of doing a mechanical cleanup and one of the things i've been trying to get rid of this vegetations quickly as possible so that yellow plucking leaves a sexual stage inside the plant and then when conditions are right and i guess they're right it ups into these orange pus you will see this is a classic example of this is what is bad who is attacking you know fairly healthy growth you know green growth that's pretty bad and that's when you're going to start having your harvest affected if it hits early as it did the first time for me you know by if it's doing this  and all that i could think of nothing really even straight ice appropriate alcohol seemed to probably be the best of course it kills the plant and kills plant cells but even that stuff i wasn't sure if it was actually the bed you can see i've been washing a lot of clothes in here about one hundred twenty so far and so here is the last of the saskatchewan my saved this one is the last one that i've introduced into the garden so it's just my or my varieties that didn't do well this year and i'm thinking well just get rid of that one and try to chase the stuff out of that and just going to get rid of it plant more of the big stuff so i have to go on right to the soil level below that first leaf and you don't want to be pushing down in the soil because you can clip the top of your clothes if you get too down because really this part here is what we want to get rid of have a little girl close on top top set so you know these are garlic sets these are viable you can see they actually start sprouting in their little thing there you can see that little growth tip coming up and there's your basal material form the root so that there could be some hope if you were really set on reviving your variety of garlic that had rust of maybe getting these out bleach those hoping that these this is the neonatal tissue kind of that is the least affected you know it's the last to grow the least effective it's up to a pickle mary stem the growth tip where new cells are being produced so it's you know that rust is coming up from the bottom maybe these guys are free of it unfortunately as you can see this year starting small you know you always want to plant large clothes for large heads of garlic and it takes a couple years two or three years to get these up to size if you're lucky so i'm trying some of the stuff gets lost in the soil there's a this year i'm more concerned about cleaning up the genetic material and then working with them sterilize in the soil obviously we're not going to be planting garlic in this bed that's real important for not only roscoe for other diseases to rotate your garlic with as long a rotation as you can handle you know with given space once you get th you're pretty much done you know in that bed for sure so be careful of your genetic stock in what you're bringing in mixers reliables sort of fide seed don't plant go grocery store garlic yeah it'll grow well but you never know what you're getting have that much amendment or anything in there that says you can see it's like cutting butter getting good crumb structure which is you know real important especially when it's hot and dry like this when they soak up a little more water those are your little flavor other half of the saskatchewan that i did it's air drying in all strainer before we did that it was just our response in the solution this is you know a very strong you know when you know ten percent bleach is pretty strong it makes your in your hand slimy you know what about the gloves on so we're going to just kind of rinse the dirt off those roots fall the bottom of the will now probably go pretty dormant as these dried down i'm assuming because you've got the this is where we just cut those leaves off and you see those you know we've got just layers of leaves coming down and forming that skin so i do assume that there's probably some of that fungus in here and it's all come off so you know picks seed quickly you know the ones that i'm going to use for planting peel them down bleaching again storm dry and then probably bleach them one more time before they go away and you can have experimented with lengths ten minutes to hopes for got them overnight on the bench and  seems good let's say an hour would be a plenty and we could see you know this is def solution so i'm you know just kind of dipping them for as long as it takes to dig the rest rants and you'll notice we've got these what we did when we planted these after bourse feets big beets so we planted like i don't know fifteen twenty beats seeds in each spacing position you know like and six eight inch space and these can get really big as a plant and then each beat of course has multiple embryos so you get three or four for each see that comes up so i have a lot of seedlings to choose from in each spot and once they're all up go in take fifty percent of them out wait a few days look for your winners take fifty percent out wait a few days look for the winners take fifty percent out wait a few days and now we're down to a few winners and you know we're all pulling a couple more out tonight we'll do it on now you know like these these are still really crowded because none of them looked that strong this one i pulled everything out around the first day i saw it because i knew this was good these guys i don't see a strong one really particularly so i let him fifty percent population to decrease see which one does the best and then you can start making decisions flopping this is one of the things i weed out if it's flopping it's gone but you know evidently some of your good ones like this guy flop of the the soil settles they're growing fast so they kind of leap out of the ground and of course this is what we want to swell up into a beat right here that's not going to do it when it's on top of the ground if the plants kind of like this on the ground and covered it will do that you know the crookedness down below doesn't matter but if they're wurman up like this it just don't work good and even this guy who's not flopping is right at the surface but they'll do better if you hill them up a little you can do this a couple times during their growth so if you've got something like this i'm just going to come in and at each position this isn't a shovel full of dirt from the chicken yard you know they loan me some soil every now and then they make more and then some like leaf mold compost thank you that's been hanging around here to lighten it up give it a little organic just go and choke him up a little right so that i try not to get it down and that apex goes be brutal that and i knows the sooner you do it the sooner you then i'm the better they grow and they i swear to god they can there it's like they can smell each other their proximity first you know don't worry about it you know whichever one still in the ground that's your strong one you know if you feel like oh i just pulled up a good one don't worry about you don't let that stop you from eating these things out so you know that's what we're going to do and then you can as they get bigger you can start to choke and mulch and to you know when you get down to the one plant go ahead and get that mulch in tight you know heal them up again this is i don't like to save some seed from the best looking carrots will probably revert to one of their parent stocks both of which i'm sure fine carrots and we're going to let strong survive do a little selection of our own so we've got a good thick stance is how i  lots of plants to work with carrots are kind of hard to get going keep them watered twice a day i did end up you know when we planted these i said i was going to just put native dirt over and i ended up mix in something kind of like what we did on the be there is a topper just an eighth of an inch so they've got to some to hold the moisture a little bit better and also something that will crust over the first up again get you know i got to get in there with the tweezers go through a lot i've got a big baggy of bill crow that i sleeps through every year and reuse them i'll use them all i use all my littles i've got like two hundred strips i'll use them all holding the sleeves up so we're out of time you can email me if you want the real garnet yahoo dot