we are now at our shortest day length he spotted the corn salad is coming on over in a corner of the garden where i'm allowing it got way out of hand last year to plant corn salad  no keep in mind that if you let it go to seed which isn't hard to do if it turns into a rather large and low low ground cover a thing and once it gets rid of those seeds they're everywhere not a bad problem the half it is a tasty wintergreen the thing that grows the best this time of year other than maybe death and if the kitties enjoying the play get the seed catalogues out and start ordering and start planning a plan first order next i've been doing it the other way for years and it's just not working if i spend a whole lot less money on seed now that i plan first and then or after some frost plus i got a late start so i'm trying to fill them out to a little bit still kind of small gyptian flat or flat of egypt which has done so well for me it's an open pollinated variety and i think it does as well if not better than any of the other hybrids so you know when they say winter gardening they mean started back in august and plant things that can hang on through the winter and that's where we're at so not planning much fresh stuff outside will be working down the lab's day then a little later planning for the sugar pods in the snow peas i found out was a good idea following the sun wish i could sleep in like that yeah but somebody's got to make chicken feet around here and who better than me to make chicken feed anyway  that i you know through and we went fishing and timber you know so let's say last week in august and we got that real hot weather everything jumped and bolted and was doing all kinds of stuff and i did notice some of the mustard's are bolting and one of the but one of the things i found that was you know bolting person you know quote unquote because it is going to bloom is what i realize is probably a purple you know depending on the weather anywhere from thirty to sixty days and good like this i like the sprouting broccoli raw better than regular broccoli so go all trouble in paradise this is what separates make this is the flat of lettuce that we've been growing just for you know sort of cut and come again harvest wheat mode this down and it's all recovered and at this point i think they're almost getting big enough where i just remove the outer leaves go into it by hand you know as the plants get larger i think they're less amenable to the chopping and you know the plants the leaves are big enough where you can just harvest since outer leaves but a week or two ago i was i was pointing out and bragging how well mice slug pellets were working these are the you know animal and bird friendly  iron phosphate based pellets but they've they've got this set cereal bait you know that which is what the slug wants to eat in that and just the iron phosphate and which immobilizes it and renders the slug harmless and dead by the way but what happens is they get they get wet like here's this spot right here they do get wet in fact they're more effective when they're slightly moist and they will start to mold and unfortunately maybe this flat was a little wet i see some damping off type activity here and now this mold which was growing on the sluggo stuff is now overtaking these weakened plants you know because these were cut so some of the stumps maybe were open to infection and now as you can see this is taken over right down to the base of the plant so i'm not quite little out of hand there in the future maybe i'll sprinkle those pellets somewhere other than directly on the flat matter it's funny because you know you'll see one that's just deader than a doornail right next one that's perfectly fine so we're going to do is you know maybe pull off some of the lower leaves that don't look so good just so they are out of the way you know open up that canopy a little bit so we'll go in and do all that and let's also experiment  drugstore you know for cuts and bruises and whatnot it's a three percent solution and it's perfectly harmless you know you can use a mouthwash and you can you know some people even drink the food grade stuff in certain solutions for you know certain you know health benefits that i'm not familiar with but i know that it's done so i'm going to get  t some of the fuel you know the decaying fuel out of there for the fun guy that will be hitting it with this hydrogen peroxide to see if that doesn't knock this stuff back in fact does seem to be i'm encouraged by the fact that the mycelium is delicate enough that it's kind of collapsing under the spray of the stuff a lot of times you get those sort of like the bread molds we get those colonies that just said any kind of liquid even so liquid they can just set it off so you know at least the seems to be penetrating a little bit like i said it won't hurt the lettuce or the edibility of the lettuce so we'll try that try to salvage what's left here and because these leaves been really good for lunches and dinners the other thing i can do to help prevent this is particularly this damping off as let's take one that's not too far gone as for as is here what we've got here we've got something attacking the crown here the plant appears looking fine as i don't see where it was specifically the cutting that i did that got infected almost seems to be starting from the base and going up so that tells me that i'm too wet you know i'm out there in the greenhouse it's very moist and i've been kind of cheating on the ventilation to try to hold some heat in and this is evidence of more air i need more air circulation keep desplat a little bit drier pull that humidity down in the dome a little bit and you can  hopefully prevent this sort of thing so it's several different things happening in there is the slug pellets it's some damping off it's you know the environmental conditions for the plant and i just got kind of the perfect storm in this secure flat didn't lose always had them kind of lose all their leaves and just turn into these stumpy things and in fact i just you know i have four or five of these going they all stumped right there with these little curly q leaves tropicals and this one turned out to be a little drier than i expected keeping that root ball just barely moist and let it go dry and between watering seemed to help a lot see a very pretty plant but very tropical i think the other thing i've been doing wrong with these is keep him down here in the basement during the winter it's you know we're all me fifty eight degrees right now and it gets a little cooler at night and some of these true tropical species just can't hack it you know they want it above sixty at least all the time so i've been doing some treatments on these in the meantime before we and he's been soaking and with these large seeds i like to leave half out so they're not drowning in water because they can take on a lot of water these are doubled in size and was specially with these bigger seeds sometimes it can go mushy on you or just bursts like this one actually we can you can see it's the little leaf now it might just be germany in that quickly although i've got my suspicions  i think it just burst from taking on too much water too quickly you can see it got the light colored seed and the dark colored seed this is obviously a more mature you know seed these are the ones that didn't quite r degrees you know like i said i've been finding out how important that is going to put four in here a sort of mineral mulch on top here so it helps maintain an easy choice you're not constantly going up and down in and what we're going to do now  take a little that's all you let him so for a while right up from the bottom for a couple of minutes do come up and so what's happening back here is some seedlings and some more pineapple seedlings this stevia really did turn out to be a heat lover this is the sweet leaf  let's grab the pineapple and go and walk over here and talk about what's going on here start with pineapples once again you know i've been growing these things  i found some seeds last year in a pineapple and they've just been popping ever since that's a whole nother batch and the thing i've found out with these is not too much water they take in most of their water as most for millions do brilliant through their leaves during their first you know month or so so you know he starts out moist by don't actually water and i just missed him every day and you know if you check in on these you know once a week let's say be plenty and then you'll find these little bursts of of germination you know ones two three and then sometimes you'll open it up be one two three four five six seven eight nine is like nine or ten of them in there you know ranging from one with squished believes because he's so advanced i obviously didn't check these every week to ones that are just showing their roots and you kind of want to catch them when they're just a speck a green this is an ideal environment this is a ziploc bag paper towel eighty five degrees on the heat mat very war obviously very moist constantly the same moisture content and i started trying something new as well i was reading somebody else's stick and i've often so seeds in hydrogen peroxide a sort of a pre rinse of presoak and then i rinse them and i put them on a paper towel like that well they person i was reading up pointed out that this is your three percent crock side the rest is water it's like so you don't really need to rinse them or anything so this paper towel has just been so proxy three percent stuff and it really has kept the mold down i see a little bit of the black mold specks in there but it's really helped with that so just straight hides your proxy is a really dial this  especially only have so much room in the tropic dome there so i'm going to start you know i'm going to put four or five of these in a single pot these guys are going in just just kind of nearly they're almost you know there's sitting in that gravel as much as on top of it because the plant will straighten up so in this case i can still see that seed that's hanging onto so it's not very deep you know it's just speck of green  etc and i think it's time we pot this guy up don't you you know he's this was the nursery pot where he planted all the seeds once again i didn't get very good germination but better at least i got one good time you can email me if you want to bill gardner at yahoo dot com that's all one word in lower case you can also call me up and show us in from the phone after the tuesday evening show you can also visit that website that's w w w dot the real garden dot com there's pictures of chickens and we