welcome to the real garden this week i'm actually going to do a rerun from last week where we have a good discussion on the tomato grafting which was happening exactly this time last year but i felt i had a viewer e mail me and said that her chicks were scared of her so i felt it important to do a little review of how you handle the chicks  and so they're not afraid of you and i want to of course show them off and show you their progress so we're going to do a few minutes here of care and then there's going to be an  abrupt bump in the in the content here when we bump into last year's show but i thought this was important as you can see we're looking at the new brood hut they are outside been outside for a week now and they're loving lets the camera crew is out of town so you're going to have to put up with my jiggly technique here but here we are you know in the box we do have a heat lamp going i've got one hundred fifty watt infrared bulb that i got at the pet store this is a lizard ball but you know it's infrared so it doesn't interfere with their night time sleep cycles we've got the lovely sky light you know which i've actually shaded half the sky light because despite my fears of the chicks being cold actually the danger was cooking them during the sunny days so i've got a little you know  shaded half the skylight vents wide open on the ends and i've actually been leaving this lid as well i've got a i've got a little grid you know some hardware cloth here you know that goes over the box and then i leave that lid open during the day so they don't get overheated so here they are hendo darlings whom my lovely chicks and these are some of the most well socialized chicks you're ever going to meet in your life and i just want to kind of share with you how i do it again and again my palm is down when i'm approaching the chicks in tanks and i don't necessarily always i'm not always grabbing at them so much he's come in and they'll come right up to me there's a rosy you know hop straight up on my hand and wants to come up and that's because i'm not always grasping at them if if i were to you know go in and grab at them or try to pet them like a puppy or a kitten on the back they don't like that i always approach them from below couldn't rosie i'm just going to put her on here and show you what i do i always come in from below here see she likes that down here along the breast and on the legs and kind of in between along that keel she loves that but watch what happens if i go on top here she doesn't like that that you heard those little distressed peeps and that's what's going to happen if you're always grabbing at them like this see that she doesn't like that but if i go down underneath and say hello rosie hend sweetie she likes that so actual probably hop on over here come on rosie i always let them come to me and see i'm just a big fun jungle gym at this point because i'm not always grabbing at him so it's very gentle sweet calm and you let them kind of be chickens you know they're not puppies they're not kittens you've got to treat them like a chicken rosen's you know you're a good girl and after a while you know i do when i'm playing with them now now that they're completely socialized they're not afraid of me  and not always grabbing and i'm not every time my picking them up or necessarily grabbing them or making me do anything i just say hello you know and go and go and and you know so they're just they don't associate you with you know being picked up against their will or any of that stuff and at this point you know if i need to transport them i just wait i just say hello ok where do we want to go today you know so i can bring them out and bring a man i can put them in another box while i clean this one you know and they just think it's a lot of fun because i'm not imposing my will on the chicks you know i've learned a lot over the last ten years about handling these birds and this kind of the the distillation of that knowledge and i just wanted to share it with you  you know because a lot of people are getting chicks this time of year and you know you might as well you know make it fun for both you and the chicken you know so there's rosie and  i think that's probably it i hope you enjoy the rest of the show tomato grafton coming up is going to be a little bump in the content here but we'll be back almost live next week see you next week even you know my materials for when they're really active and i've actually bumped up to your gallon pump sprayer rather than the little hand gun because they are everywhere obviously when the when the rains the you know these snow and snap a really susceptible to these little devils but a pretty i'm pretty happy much better than last year and got it done on the first and chop a few plants there quick before we start chop and i like to transfer you know they grow up in the little six cells here's their victim for the day so before i do the grafting i like to give them a little more space because they are going to be indoors for a few more weeks they recover from the operation so i like to transplant them up before i get started there gives them a wider base in these things you know you don't want them falling down and you don't want to be about five minutes for this for a full can and adult steam pasteurize your soil so this isn't particularly this isn't like sterilized but i gave it a little shot just because you know this is hard on the plant obviously this is the both forte grafting stock root stock my good maxi for it last year and it was pretty pretty happy with it but like i said it it like had no  that sort of thing and then i also put a low cut a really well finished compost in this one start getting them used to parents and you know real live nutrition in there just unsettled you want young as verticals possible when you doing this because obviously when the science stock is sitting on top anything off vertical is just more gravity pulling it you want to sit right on just put some this is a little bit of plant food teaspoon about half an hour that's probably just twenty twenty twenty just to give it a you know mild fertilizer down here in the basement i do use know organic salts down the basement because like you have fish in the basement sorry it's alright it's alright you know you don't have to use a whole lot of it but if you know plants do the nutrition one way resistant not immune to soil borne diseases so the tomatoes are still obviously susceptible to fully or disease so if you want to make sure your hands are nice and  doing any undue stress to the plant ok so here we have here's the transplanted root stock got a label in here so i know this is the bow fort started on three eight eleven and what are we going to do here let's do nice clean straight reserve and a little bit of alcohol for between cuts this is already been dipped and we've got our science first thing we want to do is take any leaves off in the sky don't need those catalinas have already fallen off so we're good to go there we don't want to make the graft too close to the soil because we want to keep that graft out of the  i need to come over here obviously tomatoes are tapered as you go up and down and you need to match the diameter so you kind of want to consider where you're going make the cut on the side what's going to match up to the root stock and have give it a good eyeball before you even get started it's always a trick trying to keep you know to grow these that you know you know they grow at different rates they grow  t different internet all levels meaning that you know the leaves or at different you know levels as they grow so it's always a trick trying to match these up doesn't have to be perfect but the closer it is the better off you're going to be so in this case i'm going to risk it i think this is just enough where i want to make that cut and i can match it on this guy over here it's always good to grow plenty of match up you know the angled cut this way that all the gravity is pushing down on a flat surface and i find that it is really the way to go ok this is going to go right o there is any kind of angle i like to do is a summary and like to kind of get it started on the rootstock and then since these are see through it's kind of nice you can just push that down like to hold it up to the light and you look for any gaps in there and see any kind of tricky not bad for my second one of the year i've had to do a practice one before we started filming consider the first couple don't always go so well so if so that's a look at pretty good let's call jiggle these too much and you don't want that touching the plant at all it's just to keep the humidity going in there i missed it like once in the morning once that night you can see it's off the light then share the kind of go into a lower light flop there's not a heck of a lot you can do about it you could try taking the side out off the side off make a new cut a little bit lower straight across street price these are just about perfect size right here right now you can see how those are going to match up pretty darn well evitable you get a little bit of angle on each one so you can kind of treat it as an eccentric and you know find where they match the best you'll see them see down once you get the angle matched so again that's that's about it so it takes takes you know you'll know in a about a week week and a half whether these are taken or not in the high humidity dome it's it can be fairly interesting to see how long this takes to actually die if it's got enough humidity around some problems you can have specially in the high humidity sometimes the graph won't take and so this guy will just start sprouting groups above the graph not good not a good sign not much you can do about it once it starts happening and then of course the other thing that's going to happen is  o come out and start sprouting below the graph and it'll start devoting energy to its own well being rather than the science well being so you want anything that's sprouting from below the graph you want to make sure that it comes off and keep an eye on it through the season there they're kind of tricky they'll start sending up things even where you didn't think they have a node to do that with so i just said all kind of this is the critical point right now i'll know if you're i mean if it really isn't going to if it's just a bad graft use you know within a couple of  well so that's the basics and one thing you can do also i should mention save the top of that root stock and go ahead and stick them in some water you know these s if i'm depending on these i'm in trouble because by then it's going to be too late but just a little back up you can reach those up back i don't know grow mouth and the crummy green tomatoes that these are the roots produce and maybe you can have your own seed rather than buying it next year i haven't heard of anybody doing that before but  you know these seeds i think it was like fifty bucks for two hundred fifty seeds which for me is you know i mean that's like a ten year supply you know usually grow a few dozen of the size of the root stocks and a whole and sure enough they were i put them in a folded paper towel and as it blocked threw him up on the bay window and forgot about him checked them like in november and four or five had sprouted those seedlings kind of i don't know how long they were in the bag so they didn't do too good when i pulled them out they're still alive but they're not actually growing they warm the bag up you know start taking care of it and more of the seed sprouted and this is sort of the last batch and i took special care of these  keeping warm and humid was key so you can email me if you want the real garden at yahoo dot com that's all one word more case you can also call me after the show i listen to the phone after tuesday evening show but you can always leave a question or comment on them sheen and visit the new website the real garden the real garden dot com i'm trying to put a post up every week at least one or two some interesting stuff some tutorials etc will see