and welcome to the real garden here we have clearly getting sort of done with her dust bath basically this is a real typical chicken behavior they they like to find a nice dry patch of dirt they'll dig themselves a little hole they'll roll around in it they do this special feather fluff thing where they get all the dirt in between the feathers and of course this is skin there's she's work in that oil gland making sure all those feathers are or yelled up after the dust bath now the thing is i've left this bed that she's sitting in covered all winter long just kind of made it part of the chicken run so they've had a nice place to go and pack and scratch and bathe you mean when it's raining during the winter and spring months but and what's happened is if you leave the chickens in one bed too long that that soil turns to dust thus the dust bath that's what she's in right there so this soil is getting pretty tired very desiccated that's why the chickens like it so what i'm about to do like i said this has been covered for months now with the little hoops there and the wind blew the cover off so what i'm going to do is i'm going to allow that to happen sorry girls you're about to lose your dust bath but what i'm going to do is i'm going to let that rain rehydrate this soil this is a highly mineral alder od ceres glacier all dust soil you know when the last ice age retreated this is what we're left with and so it's a good soil you know as far as  drainage goes it's got a lot of mineral in it but what happens is once these chickens are done they've they've blown a lot of the carbon out of the soil you know their droppings while it's good for nitrogen  nitrogen goes in and you know the microbes get ahold of it and they use what carbon is in the soil for their life prophecies and what happens is you get this sort of tired soil you know there's the little dust bath bowl as you can see it's sort of the dust bowl literally so what we're going to do here is since the camera crews out of town you're getting the real gardeners  you know helmet cam view of what's going on here and what we're going to do is we're going to do a little discussion on what to do with these blank beds i haven't had much time to work the beds this spring the things that i do have going are you ready to come down all the cool weather crops are kind of finishing up which is going to leave me with a lot of hot weather crop beds to work with so what i'm going to i've got thirteen beds in all i'm going to be working through i'm all here and trying to get some of the summer crops and so that's what we're going to be discussing all righty then we're taking this opportunity to do a little lecture series as long as we're up on the tripod might as well discuss some soil and soil structure basically this white board is sitting right on top of the tomato bed that we're going to start planting in with these lovely grafted samples from the mail order catalog and i didn't have a chance to craft my own this year i was just too busy things came up growing months but the first thing we need to do is address the soil issues you know this is been kept very very very very dry not only during last summer during the growing season but also during the been problems for me this is why i've gone to the grafted root stock a disease resistant root stock but really no matter what kind of plant you're growing you need to address the soil issues and  just as we're looking at the chicken dust path over there where the soil has been very desiccated the biology has been suppressed as kind of what we're dealing with here the first thing we're going to want to do is rehydrate to my basic you know once a year per member on mineralisation you know where the nutrients come from how he worked in the soil so we're just going to spend a few minutes doing that so here we've got capacity and this is a short cut it is see you see and it's you know it's kind of one of those things once you get beyond the sheer night june a related so you've got a player who's basically a little minor you know he's going out and he's you know those roots that you've got are sneaking out there looking for something when they find what they're looking for let's   what it does is it shoots off a hygiene molecule in you which is positively charged and that's going to attract you put a space in the court the mineral or the  is in the soil now there's two kinds of things that are going to be negatively charged that will track these and one is a clay particle is a very fine you know if you're in the that bottom land down by a river you're going to find a lot of clay is not going to have very good drainage because those fine particles but it doesn't really good job so we're going these different nutrients now you know if you've got a sand particle you know big chunk negatively charged particles you you at humus you know compost you know whether you've got a clay soil or sandy soil you know these organics the carbon that you're putting into the soil is going to  you've got a problem with some of these nutrients draining off into the water that environment if you want to maintain them in place and also  available to plant so what do we do we we put a bunch of compost in bunches stable carbon which is going to start feeding the microbes that are down in the soil the fun not you know bacteria fun c meeting carbon down nutrients are going to be available to plant tell they kind of gone through a process of biological metabolism you know basically you available to the plants so on a go that's a theoretical low so on the more practical level you know make sure your plants are out of the way haven't seen the winter rains at all and you know the reason i'm you know part of the experiment generally you would rotate the tomato crop from bed to bed to bed every year but part of this experiment is using the grafted disease resistant root stock and planting in the same place every year and just kind of testing you know how tough these guys are going to be and i've got a little end i you know that because the the soil has been works like with chickens working their bit we still have a nice problem structure and this is a very hard thing to describe but you know you you know you store and get a bag of spearmen to work for a buck a bag basically about fifty of them and that's just fine that's what i did last year but this year i've got actually something a little finer than that this is some  i'm certain to rearrange the garden so i'm losing space but this is some beautiful leaf mold this is lee you know autumn leaves room bout three years ago that have start while i put this confluence down serve on the patches i'm actually going to reach make the plants reach out for you know now we're going to put that those little tiny tomato plants was sort of a surface chicken manure experiment that went wrong and then went right then went wrong what i can see input a little bit of water and you know there's going to be a little explosion oh the biological action here hopefully you know the bill goes well and it's going to start eating this stuff burning and we'll see you know whatever inputs i kid you know within a few days you know you're not going to be able to see exactly what you put in there you know a little clumps and lumps those big lumps out if you'll notice that i've actually retained the mulch from last year and old use again a little another layer on it if you visit the website there's a real good write up on how the towers are going to go