you did the right thing well rosie was on cue i was way off welcome to the real garden holding the lettuce behind the camera to try to catch your attention and she decides you just go for it so chickens loose the performing poultry oh  year are full of energy those longer days really get them go and when i come out in the morning they're like little tin toys that are wound up a little too tight and cannot wait to get to work scratch and peck and it's all about worms these days cabbage tetherball which if you were turned me on to have been working pretty good during the day of that i have to come up with something else i saw an interesting thing on on a cyclical fodder system where it's sort of grown in hydro trays to town wheat grass or turfgrass on a weekly cycle you know this expensive system you can buy into if you're a commercial farmer like dairy or beef cattle but it kind of got me thinking maybe i'll get the system going for the girls here start i'm in the same concept in garden flats ten many have to do something like that they tell you you know when i had three chickens we seem to have enough biomass to keep them happy for chickens still pretty good with five or six chicken and i'm really pushing the envelope for a small garden like this i don't think i'd want any more at this point so they'd rather have five happy chickens you know eight miserable chicken these girls are happy there just going strong there you know another couple months here and i'll be one solid year of on the lay doing their thing kitty of course is on the whole retirement program eleven years old this year about so i figure it's about one hundred fifty in chicken years when i can supervise i let the mingle because you know kitty does like to and she's gregarious animal like all chickens are and she likes to have the company of others even if they are picking out her pin feathers but lately when there i can't supervise them planted you know maybe a dozen seeds every three or four inches in clumps rather than a continuous row and you can sort of see these little pompoms of seedlings coming up we've got just about every you can see one week one i've got a couple goods ceilings and one blank spot in this morning i pulled up a couple extras from one of the other spots and stuck them in we'll see if it works it's  kind of a crude method but it worked i think and then well these are gritty because these are one of the most interesting seedlings i don't show up well on next to this dark soil then when the before it's sprouts the seedlings coiled up in there like a spring it looks a little snail shell and it pops open has this very smooth why that's how they look when they first emerge and then obviously this guy starting to put on some active growth down here so we've got a good standard these these are known for low germination and a very short shelf life of the seeds i think the low germination is probably older seed you know i think that's why they're known because i got a just about one hundred percent i think they really came up strong i can actually see a little seam ripped in the soil when they came up because i planted them so they could just kind of look down a see that grow often up planning and the like this really helps him pop her any kind of crusting on the soil which you might get this time of year when we're having alternating dry them  water table more than spreading out on the surface so i do keep them fairly dry on the surface we're just about post emergence here almost all the seeds are up and after this i'll let them dry out a little bit more just depend on the snowden is a springtime herb and then the will of chicory is the belgian and that we grow that all summer long into the fall into the frost and then harvest the roots to force them down stairs so those are going to be in for a long time moving on we planted the cabbage up last week and they're looking really good some little bedding plants you know we're kind of bored in february and started some cabbage maybe it was march and you know lo and behold they got healthy and big spike sort of being in the back of the bench and so we planned those up we've got six you know confident zigzag pattern to get as much space as possible as much as little sun competitions possible slug damage to the u s after a week of planting first off i think the chickens did a really good job you know they tracked it through here they're on the protein fixation any kind of slugs worms pretty much go down the gullet and they had a couple weeks to really rake through this and clean up any of those pasts we do have the copper rings down on these guys this is a you know like a twelve gauge grounding polish it up with vinegar to make it nice and bright and then i to keep it nice even consistent moisture that's really important for the brassicas they've got a shallow fibrous root system doesn't not very extensive  so they need sort of that if you're just right moisture to keep the roots in good shape and then so i put a little mulch down of this  know it does come from the sea and i'm not sure those slugs are going to like that and then i've also dusted with a little bit of ground limestone you know and that's the white stuff sitting on top here and you could see it coming off on my fingers because we it hasn't rained yet now after the application i just took you know let's say maybe a quarter cup of the ground blunt dolemite limestone and sprinkled it all over limestone is calcium carbonate it's an alkaline ingredient and of course slugs don't like alkaline that's why the ammonia in the slug feels dissolved them so this is something that i got from the u k a little website was talking about you know they just throw cups full of limestone up in the air and dust everything you know couple you know every other week or so and they claimed it knocked back so you know various techniques you can use and kind of in combination i you know bred to my pee technique was planning in february or january these things can sprout in january as you can see you get a real early start and season you know these guys are already at the you know twelve and fourteen  inch level growing like crazy there internode are starting to lengthen which is reflected in the spacing of the trellis as you go up they get wider you know by the mid may they're going to grow and once you know they'll clear a string a day at some points of their life very tall vine beautiful magenta and indigo flowers and i'm working on a variegated green and purple pod  snow peas or snap we haven't gotten snow or snappy part yet but i've got everything else so a couple other varieties that i might try to introduce some of their characteristics into the  and still is a little bit these guys are catching up but you know i know which for which company i'm going to go with next time already and then back here is a little italian variety mongo tutto which means eat it all and some other snow pea tight makes great big huge pods you know like five six inches long and up to an inch and a half wide also a purple flowered variety which is very unusual and it does have a tinge of purple i'd love to kind of get a little genetic near tiriel from this over here first vice and see what happens and then the front row is super snappy which is a the world's largest snap pe itself we'll see how that plays out so you know if you've been up for a couple weeks now and they still aren't even needing asking for a string yet i don't know i think do right now is pot i'm up a little bit get some more air into those roots let them know that they're not going to be there forever so what i was doing is mixing up a little lot of soil out here because the pearl it's real dusty and this is just  turned out to be about fifty percent of my recycled mix this is potting soil from the past and it's a blend that i can't recreate because i can't get them in all the materials and  of settle looks a lot better than it did and you know the compost i put in here looks a lot better now than it did when it came out of the bag i put them in the plastic coffee cans i put them in the microwave for forty five minutes until they compost does break down and becomes fine in the soil and to put some perlite and i was lucky enough to day to find course the fine stuff fine for seed flats just starting but this is really what you want  last year i was actually sifting bags because i couldn't find course enough and i'd separate you know the big chunks from the little chunks so i basically have i'm sorry one part of the per like two parts of the soil and here i about if i could put more perlite and i would but basically this stuff is so course that at a higher ratio it all just float there's always a you know half an inch on top because it just won't incorporate so as you can see this stuff is going to have a lot of air space in it with that big perlite in there so let's go down and give our babies a little medicine a little better  and see a little bit of epsom salts seems to have helped and just drying them out a little i think they were too wet to have a hard time in fact since last week's show so it's been exactly one week and now they were there really li e which is exactly what i kind of wanted to have happen getting them into a bigger pot is going to help the water table go lower that water table away from the roots and just get some oxygen in there so let's go ahead  normally at this point and go to a three inch pot the way things are going if you don't want to pot up a limited root system into a huge  and put them in the whole thing enough about a half an inch of water in what i'm soaked it up it's done filming here and what i you'll notice the roots want to go down the side of the pot so it actually invented a little what i want is a cone of soil in the middle with four you know channels leading down  and peppers you don't want them to deep when you can put them a little deeper than the original soil level don't get carried away they will root a little it what it does is it provides that sort of mineral mulch on top there which holds the moisture in but let's let's the soil breathe through well so let's give them  all the soil because the roots are occupying a lot of it and i want these guys to and since they're not so small they're not transpiring a lot of moisture it takes a long time to dry you know this amount of soil in the plants not pulling any of it up so i'm the time for another one one minute it's wander out oh you can email me if you want real garden yahoo dot com that's all one word lower you can also call me at the show i listen for the phone after the