welcome to the real garden happy new year filming a little ahead here so i'm not quite sure which today it is but by the time you see this it's the news and you smell what i smell it's not i smell spring it's it's you know i'm looking at the weather chart here and after sort of a frosty but dry december i started seeing temperatures that are almost growing whether anything over fifty degrees is going to  start growing things like lettuce and broccoli and mustards and that sort of thing of course you've got a line a few of them up in a row you know one isolated incidents but you know i saw one day where i was like you know forty nine is the low mid fifty's coming up grow a lot of things so we're going to take a look outdoors here and talk about what's going on  and we're not going to be planting anything outdoors today but you know got to start planning ahead right now seed catalogs come this time of year for a reason there's there's a few things the girls are doing good they're just kind of going through their little winter phase here a lot of lot of standing around a lot of preening a lot of feeding not much else  in her own little world i like what i saw those christmas decorations coming down of the seed racks were up you know that's you know you got your your back school you got your hollow wean you got your thanksgiving in the christmas and really the next big thing is spring gardening season and all the box stores so i saw a couple brand new seed racks up that's what i want to see save on those shipping costs a clio so in the showdown but i guess now that you're out here the stick good look at you this one weighs like crazy in the spring starts molting about fourth of july is fully feathered out by labor day and  got her own will schedule there she knows what she like at them first off you know they don't get any rain when they're covered so the first thing you want to check in is make sure your soil moisture is good i like it on the dry side out here so you can see it still packs a little bit there's plenty more ice for this time of year but as you can see it's also crumbles nicely after packing so that's just about right right there you want to have enough moisture for growth but to keep in mind the not transpiring much moisture in the soil got pretty saturated before it covered it and certainly there's not much evaporation that you know thirty eight degrees or whatever temperature is outside so i found i did not need the water probably covered these up and to keep the rain off keeps leaves clean keeps from pummeling the plants keeps from compact in the soil gives them a little bit of warmth advantage and certainly the frost fall keeps off these so it's just that little bit of bandage and the other day i'm going to do it while i'm in here you know getting weeds out you know you can see these plants were crowded i do that on purpose but when you start  the leaves just you know aging that's going to start molding deteriorating going to slide i'm it's going to be laid up against another leaf and it's going to cause problems for that leave so you know if you see anything brown or you know just all the slu haven't really had cold enough weather i'm almost hoping for a snap to knock some of these greens down but if not we can still go pull some of the fruit if i can get one up by looking around for a so this is a smaller one and that's what we're really after some of these baby greens and thought i'm here can be good for a salad it's going to be a better green but you can use some of those inner leaves up fine put them in your regular lettuce and see which think of it but what really grown these four is kind of we're going to twist sees leaves off kind of leave a little bit of a tip on that one got a little bite to it and i like it so in order to get the mild flavored she come you know of belgian and i'd like to see it store we're going to take our big roots here and  never get as big because i plant so late but even a root this size we're going to pack this and wet sawdust or wood chips or whatever in a pot invert another pot over it so it's in the dark and bring it indoors  for sprouting broccoli i just direct so on a whim paul and i was just coming out just emerging i thought well i'll stick a couple of these and see if i can intermingle these and  this being in the ground like up till june it will start producing you know march april through may which point will be this big gangly bush and you know you pull it out usually around june so you know it's nice to be able to double up this bed and you have a space for this it's almost like getting an extra bed by being able to do these in the same space as you can see they've grown well together you know kind of at the same rate  they're fighting each other a little bit but when this and it's gone these guys will this is about biggest they get you know between late august and this time of year so these are looking fine and healthy and  i suspect actually probably the best harvest of the purple sprouting for had for quite a while it's been a long time since i've had this many plants going all at once let's just talk about the garlic just because  i might add but i've got to look at the garden which you know that way i don't dig down and look at it and you know no growth obviously on top it hadn't even put out any little green tip but roots about so two and a half inches long i'd say big big beautiful bundle of those nice white roots you know and you know they were planted the week before thanksgiving so you know it doesn't look like anything's going on there is but it's in just a month these things are really come to life and are actively growing you know i was amazed to see how many roots are on there so i guess it is an argument for getting that garlic in you know see how that lovely that lettuce is in there you know those are salad greens lately and this little flat technique of just planning on on mass in the in the ten by twenty one has really been to get him up and running because it is awful cold outside for the baby plants but what there once are up when you have three or four leaves on them you can stick them outside and you know if you only have room for one indoors you can keep starting one of it this gets to be you know seventy eighty feet tall with you know this sort of vegetation all the way up as you can see it forms its trunk with the old leaf shafts  tree resin you know it was renowned for certain properties now kind of kind of frightened in its native environment but easy to do from seed in fact this is my last one that i had  you know like three or four of these things and particularly the one got so big that i had to put it outside and i was trying to put it over the winter and it succumbed to our climate so easy from but the reason they're threatened in their own environment is because it was distributed by a sort of a dodo like it was a lot very large pigeon type it was relative of the pigeons or a large you know now extinct  very tasty apparently bird very slow bird so when people got on the islands they were wiped out but the birds you know distributed the seeds and ate the berries seeds and so the distribution the plants is you know obviously not helped by the lack of the bird but you know common in captivity so this guy's been growing in this pot for quite a number of years about eight years i think you can count the rings you know how many leave no nodes as you had i kept them in this small pot specifically because the other one got so big so this sort of a bonzai you know kind of  purposely stunting this thing generally they do not start branching out until they're very old you know like not in my lifetime old so you know hopefully by stunting it a little maybe we can get a little  branching you know maybe by the time i die you know pass it on to the next generation to donate it to the arboretum or something so what we're going to do though is potted up this soil's got to be  pretty used up on this guy you know and he's got all top heavy and the soils was hard to water because the water spills out all over so we're going to take a look see what he's doing down here is the other reason we can do this because i'm a little curious and i can feel you know some for instance i can feel this root down or it's in the water you know that roots toast he's all hollowed out not a lot of water for these guys he does very well serve have up in the upstairs room we have a variety of plants that sweep for get to water and that's where this guy goes where he's in a pretty dry environment for the most part you can see you know sort of you can almost see the red ness you know and this makes me want to nick this plant see if it's really got red blood fact you know what f so just go you know don't we you've seen people you know get the score the roots not not with this kind of root these are big tap root type stuff the when you do in the little trees they actually trim the roots and pull them up once a year repotting trim the roots and you'll do a lot of that know that things are changing here i'm not going to go all caveman on this guy so those are a little different so what i've done here this is a nice little pot we're going to put them in as you can see we're not going to much bigger even with this rudy mass i don't want  to for one thing you lose control of the of the moisture content and you know if you've got a big barrel of soil there you soak it all down it's going to take three months to dry out if you need to get it dried out and by that time the plants rotted out so we go just a little bit bigger helps almost look like who i like it could have gone a little bit bigger but this is going to be good because i also want these nice aerial roots in in view i like those so this is essentially sort of a soil based you know with a little bit of the air you know the mineral additives you know for drainage and that sort of thing but i measured out how i got an idea of how much oil i need and then w all way to the bottom but i am going to use a couple shirts just cover those huge hole and work those roots out a little more but you know here's what we're going to do and then we're going to you know put all of gravel on top water this guy in just a little bit because it's still winter so this guy is actually kind of dormant right now you know you follow up on this guy this is the sugar leaf plant you know it's thirty times sweeter than sugar when you eat belief and we have we had some issues with this little guy have you know it's kind of hard to get  going the germination rate wasn't terrific on the seeds the seeds did sprout are fairly weak not very aggressive seedlings and what i found was moisture or i'm sorry humidity and higher temps really helped this particular plant this guy started growing so well he's actually getting kicked out of the tropical dome they've got going over there with the heat pad and the lie and everything because he's he's you can see starting to bump the top of the dome so i'm hoping that once he gets to this point you know the plants toughen up a little bit by the time they are this big you know he's kind of past that preemie stage and doesn't need to be in the incubator anymore and so he's going to come out drop back down to the ambient temperature down here which you know it's fifty eight sixty degrees and we're going to see how he does you can e mail me if you want the real garden at yahoo dot com that's all one word lowercase you can also call me at so i listen for the phone after the tuesday evening show you can also visit their website which reviews some of the techniques we use here in the real garden that's the w w w real garden dot com pictures of chickens to check out we'll see you next week