through february valentine's day how did that happen and the washington wombat didn't see it either we're coming out of a little cold spell here which wasn't too bad year had some problems with those snap peas save us nappies for later getting it in nation resistant variety and plant them later than they're showing peas and then the snow peas seem to be served in between counting backwards for mother's day and it's got a couple weeks to go but it's almost time to start thinking about starting the tomatoes and i've been doing the grafted tomatoes for a couple years here and i need a couple extra weeks to grafting process kind of sets and back a couple weeks so let's call it ten weeks for mother's day the traditional planting out date for  for tomatoes here in the northwest and g s like next week i think if i get some seeds order i'm going to try a new grafting stock for the root stock hopefully something that understands if you know a four month season with root stock i've been using doesn't didn't seem to have any kind of timeline on it it just keep growing into november and i ended up with a lot of green tomatoes so this year we're going to try something different hope for a little better weather this year and last year was terrible for tomatoes some that doesn't taste very good for a chicken but gosh they you know we're coming up on a march here where the chickens usually start land or at least that's when they used to start lan gets a little later every year of course we'll see how nine an eight year old chickens do this year and some a variety of things here some dandelion greens or one of the things that's available in the yard right now there's some i will say that the extra water in the greenhouse seems to have some effect you know those black jugs in there are full of water and even though i haven't gotten around insulating the north side of it or getting a blanket over the front side at night  know it is an enclosed area and on these last couple days have been you know sunny in the day and very cold at night it got down to twenty seven in the ambient temperature and nothing frozen in the greenhouse some of the more tropical things i brought in and put in the basement but the you know spring greens that we started to fared very well they didn't flop and dehydrate the way they do out here in the open so i think that thermal mass is really work and it gets pretty close to freezing and but it didn't freeze completely so despite my first garlic today almost up i had to go looking for it can plant in late in the season and didn't get the garlic until mid december this year of last year and so you know it always worries me a little bit whether i've blown it or not but  right about now as when i start worrying about it i start looking for it and you know it didn't take me very long to find one that's coming up there's a nice little shoe that's going to be the huge red wedding garlic hard neck  naturally another week or two you know i'll start to see in the the grid coming up and if i see stragglers i will kind of go down through this mulch you know in case the straw just got too thick or to tame those i'll look for ones that got bent over and are struggling to get up and kind of help them along just to give you an idea of micro climate even here in the garden this bed is nice and defrost and after a hard freeze last night you know when i go down to the straw it's limber it's wet not frozen this bad is like that on this side it's wet it's limber but i go in this side and it's hard it's like i go down here and know right to about the middle of this bed so you know this half of the garlics going to be a little behind this half of the bed it's just something that you take account of take account of here in the urban environment you know there's always a house or a tree or a fence or something that's kind of playing with you as far as both temperature and you know the light that the plants get so i take that into account you know here in this garden i always winter garden in the back and then summer garden more in the front because of the cherry tree shades in the back when it leaves out and back so it's kind of a see saw through the seasons i have been hacked back the cherry tree a little bit took a couple of the overhanging limbs off not too much you don't want to take too much of your trees off at any one time or will stand up a lot of water shoots make really ugly and really tree but you know i just kind of pushed it back a bit so we're still i will be putting some peas in here soon but a lot of these fans are blank you see a lot of hoops over the beds trying to dry him so i'm going to do at this point you know just kind of start getting a feel for your  that's a good sign when you see that soil structure you see some clumps not just dust that's a sign of the good microbial and fungal action ready to plant when the time comes so it's pretty cold out here so let's go inside and do some of our lab activities take a look at some of the things that you planted last week see other doing and fact all of these are frescoes the mustard family so we've got a couple different things from two weeks ago we've got some choice you know the chinese white stocked cabbage that start to put out so just to ensure that we got good germination you know that each cell's got at least one good plant in it and so i don't you know occasionally with save space i'll do this and then when i transplant them up i actually split the two but in for this purpose i'm just picking the good one and the others go away go with the winners you know sometimes it's hard to tell but if it's a tie again you know just getting that out of the way will help the other one straighten up and get bigger they do seem to be aware of each other's presence and you know like this guy got bent over even though he's bigger i'm going to take him out because this guy's snake since squat and i'm not only looking at leaves i'm also looking at these shoots you know roots shoots fruits very important to have a good stem on there so i'm looking for that nice thick stem there so you know i'm weeded out and you'll usually see a fairly significant jump in their activity when they suddenly feel a little more open less crowding so these and then these are the ones that we planted last week we've got some this is january king cabbage the seed was getting old so i planted four or five seeds in each one of those and as you can see we're you know starting to get some little guys coming up this is the purple sprouting broccoli which is doing pretty well the chinese cabbage was up within days this is like orient express chinese cabbage is more the napa variety of cabbage and it's doing really well and good really pleased with that and then our experimental buena which is a japanese longleaf mustard room not so good night paid top dollar for that seed because it was one of those fancy pants seed companies and you know i put two seeds in each cell and i've only got two up so that's not very good germination somebody is going to get to know from me that really seed cheese is worth the experiment plant more next time so obviously we're doing the same thing with these that we're going to do with these you know get them up and running pick your winners and get them out of the way these guys here are just about ready i do is i wrote just you know i pull them out this way so this time of them put them in that way any inconsistency in the lighting under there you know they always seem to pick a spot to you know that has a little brighter light there so you know that helio trope is i'm there searching for the light and so keep them rotating so you get nice even growth now the other thing that we pretty hot more ways than one lately and so what i did was i went ahead and put that under a heat mat in the next like within twelve hours and getting little  to dry out the cells a little bit you know i water them in pretty well when i'm first planting the seed so these are fairly wet and then as soon as i see emergence i try to drive them out nettle provide help prevent damping off that's where you get a low fungus right at the soil level you know you'll have some nice seedlings and also they'll start turning brown right at the soil level and flopping over and that's damping off and it's due to cold and damp conditions are prime for that to happen so as soon as i get emergence of start drying them out a little at that point you know you know as with always with every plant it seems for the most part you want  show you this because i'm excited about it you know people who watch the show know that i'm kind of a chili pepper head and this is one of the more unlikely pepper it'll actually perennial eyes and it gets sort of this is all peppers will under the right conditions but i've actually been able to keep these i had a couple bushes a few years back that survived several years  outdoors for the most part on the very coldest nights i had you to bring them indoors or right up against the house out of the frost zone but they will drop their leaves you know they get would be like a little bush drop their leaves in the winter and then come has been considered at one point the hottest pepper in the world the luke you know has kind of claim title to that but it's kind of a i'll tell you this it's kind of a whole different taste and sation the temp ans are very hot there's a very narrows just barn and burn and burn and burn let go these guys i'll give you one for roses buddy and then let go so you can have another bite right now these are known for really poor  germination and i'm just amazed that i have this sea was getting old i planted a whole bunch in this little pot and i got two to sprout which is amazing germination for this friday so i'm excited i'm going to plant some more and you get to watch so we've got these little seeds that come out of these little berries mix to a very specific depth this is going to be about they're going to be exactly like one eight inch and i'm going to plant a whole bunch of them because out of a hunt you know even with the fresh pack a seed if you plant one hundred of these and you get one to come up doing pretty good and one thing i did notice is that they recommend you know temperatures of eighty five  ninety during the day sixty during the night to simulate day and night is all chili peppers theoretically like eighty five degree temperatures and up to ninety  and but these really just put them on the normal heat pad because they didn't have my incubator up and running you know and so these were running at about seventy probably soil temperature and i got germination within ten days so i'm thinking maybe wild pepper you know might maybe it's not like the other chiles maybe it actually likes a little cooler temperature so i'm putting just maybe not even a let's call it three thirty seconds of an inch of this coconut quire small  just a little bit on there and make sure it's even tamp down good soil contact and then i use this time using this very this is the chicks grit the number one chick gri keeps the soil temperature or soil moisture just about the right level it's just and we're going to do is we put these in the ziploc bag and zip it up put it on the heat mat that will help bring the heat out and also keep the moisture exactly where it is right now it's cool to have them last for a year or two the ones they had actually died during a very dry winter i don't water them enough they do like to be dry during the winter during dormancy but these got too dry i don't think it's the cold  all lastly let's take a look at we haven't had the artichokes emerge we planted some of those last week and i was talking about duds how you know artichokes are kind of weird when they come up and here's some ha been just on cotton you know i was so the malt planted about sixteen of them and then put the rest on cotton to see you know what kind of of germination i was getting i did plant up a bunch of these that  looks good but like here's one you know this is a bad tendency for a plant the root is stuck inside the leaf casing you know the belief emerged rather than the ro first not a good side and here's here's one you know where the root just isn't something's wrong with the root we've got some sort of bad mutation going on here oftentimes i've even seen these things try to come up upside down you know so th  pick your winners now some of the you know if there's one kind of a we're going but like one like that did a big nursery pot where i took a bunch of these that were doing it and i just put them in a gallon nursery pots to see if too it will cross breed they say it strengthens the genetics of the corn to have a little bit of that wild pollen and so well put that on the heat and see whether they sprout or just about out of time you can email me if you want the real gardening yahoo dot