and welcome to the real garden you were back in the one more time oh yeah i know a lot of reruns in the past few months i'm actually officially out a reruns for last year at this time because this one scam went off the air last year and we took a little break so i guess it's back to the grind here unfortunately life settling down here a little bit to where you can funk you know i like i said if you have built that kooky it takes a little longer than you anticipated that will take a little quick look at the integration run here  so that's one of the reasons that we have been filming i've been just really busy trying to get everything together so they are growing like weeds eating like a pig always i just keep the i'm diving a little side patches of yard anymore just for the chickens you know perennial ises from those big roots you know where the girls always have a really good nutritious snack here  so they've been sleeping outside without a heat lamp any more i will say they actually got they were scared of the dark when i turned the heat lamp off and i put it in a little bad here just showing where home was and and you know just for a couple days and then i turned it off because it was getting so warm out and they really didn't want to go in the scary dark box so to grab one of the solar lights from the garden you know when those little sort of patio driveway lights that you know charge up during the day and burn for a few hours at night i grab a couple of those and put him in the coop with them well dominance in play when you're integrating the flock and depending on the fact that i've got a nine and ten year old chicken in there slowing down quite a bit even feed which has a higher protein lower calcium ratio and then the layers are on a high calcium feed so you've got to keep them separate for that reason anyway to make sure that they're kind of next to each other in a joining  s so that they're they can see each other any way you can get used to each other and it's i know it you know it looks like cleo just really box rosie there are a good one but generally it looks a lot worse than it really is you know that these aren't who you know fighting brewster's these are the bunch of hands you know and yeah feather might come out there's going to be some squealing and when i used to bring a chicken in doors you know when it was sick and let it sleep in the basement overnight every time i drop them in the pan in the morning there's a short little burst of activity where little head packing house to go on and they gotta figure it out all over again it's just part of the social structure now to know who's in charge the young ones are quick and them both and  for the two sex swing so that you know the blonde one in the black one a really mellow style is really mellow despite her size she can certainly stand up for herself but she doesn't seem very interested see what kind of leaders we've turned out to be clear has been lain steady nine years old kiddie i think is on the full retirement plan although she's looking nice and red in the face she's been fairly perky and her in a while you know trying to catch them after so yeah anyway that's the chickens for this week let's take a look let's take a quick look at the coop situation winter months and they felt that with six chickens i always felt like four was sort of my magic number with the existing coop and run out of time with just a couple more birds that felt like they could use a little extra run space you know so once they get integrated fully i'll go ahead and pop out the divider wall here and everybody can will sleep in the same coop and share the larger run real simple just make sure you bury the wire my story construction heavy stapling you know to keep out hungry raccoons string and chicken wire nice and tight is sort of a little skill set that you'll learned in a quick way i used to do like a you know it doesn't have to be vaulted ceilings or anything but it was nice to be able to stand up in there and so i had to use a forty eight inch wire doubled so i've got about a foot wire you know down and out so burrowing animals can't get in and then i do have seen used you save the wire that comes with the rolls there's always a bunch of wire around the roll to keep  how they are adding nitrogen to the soil so it's good to put a little carbon source down there so gives little biology so that you know things aren't building up there they're breaking down and  plants make sure i use the biggest best ones i've got a real monster in the corner there that i'd like to use but go ahead and seed these out and get a good batch of the seeds it's not a particularly long leave seed but if i take care of it i could have or one of the reasons i like rhubarb is it does satisfy the gardeners craving for gargantuan ism with these guys i'm just really been going to town and i did my  chicken manure in the trench technique you know in between the plants i had a good clean out from the coop here and dug a little trench between the plants put a little bit chicken manure in there cover it up keep flies off watered they don't it's on wilting a little bit not hot weather we're having last week and a game of good watering i don't like what feet necessarily but i don't have that much mulch on there so you do have to keep an eye there it is first tomato this is by a sole stis tomato project planted on the winter harvest by the summer solstice is my goal i was  what can i say dark days of december when i had planted a seed this is the stupidest which is the ultra early tomato it lived a long time down stairs under the lights and then as soon as i thought it tomatoes have the fused anther and the little cone in the middle is actually the amp there's so they are really self pollinating in fact you know it's hard to even cross them when they've got those fused dancers so give him a little jiggle you know in the commercial greenhouses they actually kind of have a forked stick tied to a reciprocating saw you know and they'll go down the row and kind of put it at the base of the plant and give the plant a good jiggle every every morning if they don't have you know the bees flying around the greenhouse so he has been wilting after a couple days as he's got a lot of foliage for this size pot so he's sucking up a lot of moisture so i do have to keep an eye out for him and i'm thinking all transplant him up here pretty soon and we should just do it on show here real quick that this super chunk make want to lose my stakes here and at this point i'm not going to go this is a nice stout plan and i go as planned i'm any deeper than he was in the pot i will tease those roots out a little bit now he's in the pop oh no he's got and a little bit of wood chips or just gravel on top helps keep those moisture levels where they should just get hot in the greenhouse you can need to watch them but still  don't even plant them till you know mid april which is already right because they generally don't put them out till mid june in this climate i'm almost at a loss as you can see they've done extremely well i this flat since i only planted the one flat and decided to just concentrate on the goldfish peppers this year a little bit of a food action there for some reason i've got a fence down in the basement all the time and they just lev peppers these actually have done really well because they were in this little incubator box where it's warm isolated from all the other plants and got a lot a light pointing at him so you can see i kept him on burner and they did really well in fact i might have been might be my new technique for next year although i'm kind of in a quandary instant whether i should pop these up or just you know direct so them kind of got a i on the weather forecast on the modeling for this early spring or early summer but generally if i've tried to plant them directly from the sick cells like this and they generally don't do as well even if it's only for a few weeks they tend to do better if i give them a little time in the pot  and a lot of these have to personnel because you know peppers i i like to plant two seeds and generally thin them to one plant herself but i've got enough plants here where maybe i can pot half of them up and if you know and then make the decision whether they go from the cells directly in or you know to go ahead and hold one out this is goldfish one a which breeding serendipitous breeding thing no one there that i started a long time ago started as a fish pepper crossed with a whole bunch of other things including i think my ball gary and carrot pepper spray and so it's now orange to golden orange and this is the golden orange i'm looking for pepper it's got serve a new mexican wrinkly morphology as far as the pepper shape goes it's a hearty and fairly large plant and really nice like them i've got a several sets of good ones rather than a straight hole i'd like to put a pyramid shape and then put the roots you know with the base of those there and then get those roots going down the sides kind of like they were in the six now peppers i don't plant very deep just just maybe barely deep or they felt they'll do some advantageous roots right at the base there but you don't want to plan real deep settle in and call it good because i got a lot of these to do and not much time to do i'm and time is running out of course label label label because they all look alike so this one is going to be since i know my own breeding and just call them g notes from last year so you know i know exactly what i'm dealing with this was my favorite one of course i thought that pepper i saved didn't have the best seat in it so why didn't get very good germination so i'm going to  left i actually had to my tomato grafting project was a bust this year i just didn't have time to get to it so what i did was i ordered a couple and i'm going to try and get these out real quick so here's a striped roman and you know you little and i guess there's the graphic right there you can see so you know i'm not really impressed with the fact that they could even get him here without killing  it looks like a good graft they are very dry so i'm to do is i'm going to put it in each of these in a little bucket of warm water kind of hang them over the edge so they don't fall and maybe give them a steak because these guys obviously if they have dehydration a little bit they need to drink so we're out of time you can e mail me if you want the real gardening got to dot com that's all one word lowercase you can also call me after the show i generally listen for the phone after this tuesday evening show but