welcome to the real garden as we head into labor day weekend kitty in the tashi here stirred molting cleo of course started a couple months ago and she's almost all feathered out again she's got her own little system of operating these two or more typical schedule you know when the truth gets short if they were laying they'd go off the way and start to molt change their feathers out chickens are all about  photo sensitivity you know they need you know twelve fourteen hours of light to keep playing some some people with those first year chickens will have chickens laid through the first winter  or well into the winter as the get a little older here we're going to sleep start lay in a little later in the spring and they start bolting a little earlier in the fall so nine and eight year chickens do a lot of multi so they and they can go into sort of a bluesy aspect and it looks like they need a little poultry prozac or something sometimes they're there you gondor stand the other losing these feathers these pin feathers are coming in with all prickly forearms they hate being handled at this point and they were pretty tolerant of my you know dealing you know i'd you know look them over and stuff during the summer we had the might issue they took a few baths and they were pretty tolerant of it when they were molting like this they really do not like to be handled at all they don't want to they don't on the black one here because those sheets are dissolving and coming apart and and the pin feathers are full of blood right now they're like little a little tubes of blood right now it's like having a you know if the hair follicle that's you know an inch and a half long that that quick you know the blood in it will will you know go back down into the follicle once it's all done but you know it's an actively growing tissue so they're serving all transition here the good news is kiddies breast there which has been bald since the last molt is now getting some feathers on it so which is good because she was getting all sunburn on her breasts there and i looked at now they preen all day long pull an old feathers out you know get new sheets off the new feathers and fluffing and rearranging oiling them all up with a little oil gland at their but yeah thanks she's looking good it's new feathers honor and it's going to be a good thing in a little worried about kitty here she's definitely actually a little surprised make it through the summer to tell you the truth seems like some days are spring is just wound down spend some extra time napping during the mid middle of the day still just lay down in a nice spot and take a little cat nap but you know i figured out i've you know made funny references to you know two hundred three hundred year old chickens and i started thinking about it now not two hundred or three hundred but i figured if i if the average dog's lifespan was let's say twelve to fourteen years in the you know dog years or seven years for every every human year i figure chickens live about half that on average so it's about fourteen years i figure chicken years to human years for very old chickens so we'll leave them to their beauty treatments and whatnot to kind of help treat each other and you know kind of clean up the bu end where they can't reach for the head feathers so i don't i don't have that much planned today it was a seventy m press check this morning on a ten hour day and i have got to come home and do the shows like the old roll into autumn you know as we approach autumn here and you know last week we looked at the carrots and we'll just look at them again here you know the fronds of them doubled in size and last time we looked at them and i'm really amazed how these are growing last week i was tell you how important it is to live in these things don't neglect the thinning of course am done a thing since last week and it shows so i've kind of been getting in here again and fortunately you know it's hard to tell but i actually did not crowd them as badly as they usually do but you can start see if they were certain to get carrots already  these guys are doing real well back in this fairly sherry shady bed real consistent moisture have been very careful not to let this bed dry out and everything's just growing very well due to the spac fairly good beats have been are really at their final spacing already because they still try to much sparser planting this time if you don't think your carrots this is what you're going to get you'll get carrots a right about that big so i've got to get there in the tweezers and as you can tell you know it would have been a lot easier to do in these last week when i could still see the soil that they're growing in at this point they're getting so big it's kind of hard you've really got to kind of come in under and it's harder to make your picks and you'll see that when you pull one out it wants can't tangle  when the especially when they're very big you know so you know you're doing a good job of this when the ones that are left look like hell they should be a should be no kind of ripped up from having this you'll see you know an immediate response within the first day or two you'll see more robust growth they'll be filling the space back in you know whatever you take out the ones that are left will fill that space back in and then it's a good time to go back through and it gets easier the second and third thinning and by the second or third one you start to see some carrots that you can put on your table squash my goodness what a difference a here you know at this point i actually have a third cage i could have stacked up there but i'm not quite sure about the stability at that point especially when the autumn rains come so at this point i'm kind of let them find their way back down you know ten foot up ten foot down that's twenty foot of vine as you can see they kind of go ariel that's the kind of grab onto each other give each other some support i've been having a lot of this going on with these hubbard for some reason i think the pollination just isn't getting to him so i'm getting some you know and you know aborted fruit here you know get those off they're not doing the planning and good  the encouraging thing is that they are still producing female blooms there's the male blooms have moved up to the top of the plant and see a lot more male blooms up here so and i am still seeing the pollinators a little less than in the height y this is the wrinkled italian butternut it was actually i was a little worried about as far as pollination and the flowers you know the male flowers would open the clothes and then the female flowers would open and close and they never seem to coordinate but i'm starting to see some fairly good looking squash you know when they start putting on this thick stem and you know the you know that this ferns been hanging on has quote you know the flower closed about a week ago it's still looking good it's not yellowing or browning or anything it's obviously starting to set up for a fur with the thicker stem looking pretty good what i like to do is this is a very interesting variety the way you have the bloom and then you also have these little serves sequels so it's i don't know it's kind of like a little leafs as well bloom kind once the blossom fades i like to get those off that attracts you know holds moisture next to the fur you want a nice intact skin obviously so get that off and hopefully  get some good fruits off of it i don't know squash i just groan because i like the bines don't even need squash i just like the gargantuan miss of them  a quick look at the greenhouse because i've actually got some right tomatoes in the greenhouse take a look in here you haven't come in here often enough to see what's going on  work this year you know i used to grow tomatoes for the paste you know for canning and so i really don't mind a late season let em all come on it with same time can end up over a period of three weeks you know i don't care when they have as long as they do write them eventually but i thought i'd be nice to have some slicers for salads in the summer of course we've had sort of a weird  but you know here we are we've got some right through i did the container choice variety over here which is the first come on the slate you know ripping itself apart like i had a big branch rip off because there was just too much for next year if i do this when i think i will i will definitely be putting you know a little comb cage on here just to give it a little more support this is just wasn't working but i've already had a couple tomatoes and they were delicious the skins are a little thick a little tough but all in all of very good tasting tomato it kind of reminded me of a brandywine almost in miniature both in the taste and in the structure of the fruit very  dense those meaty sea cavities with very few seeds in them so it's grown fairly well you know despite my neglect of these guys and the other one we've been growing is that morgan spring determine number of fruits and they all do seem to tend to come on all at once and so you can see this plants kind of you know done it's not going to put out anything but that but you know for just stick these in the corner i'm going to get some nice fruits just for you know where you are eating i just other things we should follow up on the just last week we had some horrible looking tep and peppers these are the little wild southwestern ones that are actually a woody bush down in the sonora desert you can see how this ones are getting a trunk like structure  and last week these guys were and they've been if you know a fence just won't leave them alone all year long of kind of been letting them go waiting for some sort of field predator to clean them up for the predators you know here in the greenhouse didn't clean them up so basically that it had you know what four or five of these type leaves totally eaten up totally a food ised infecting this good clip that went off at this point because we've got all this new growth we potted these up last week i added in some native dirt from the chicken yard you know a little bit of fertilizer obviously also those trace minerals that are hard to get you know with these so if soil lifts mixes and i'm really impressed agents off the start to grow a lot better basically they're there defending themselves you know i'm still alive but i'm not going to put out a new growth because it's really love the new growth and so once you but again an immediate response once the plants that are left have a little more room they're not fighting for this on the water the resources almost immediately i saw a lot better growth it's not exactly knee high by the fourth of july but probably didn't get these until the fourth of july and actually i feel this one and this one for actually start to get we're just at tassel here as you can see there's a little you know cob starting to form a little bit of taslima so i think there's still hope that i'll see some of this corn produce this year this is a hock an emerald green it's got a real dark green kernel to it it's mainly a flint corn for tortillas that sort of thing but apparently you can pick them young  and roast them rub them with chili in line and salt and they're supposed to be really good so maybe i'll try one of those this year like the sun we're already short on time let's take a look at these that but i thought i'd try it as a late cabbage so i said you know back in july like mid july i managed to start a few indoors you know get some bedding plants going and you know like little neglect there but i managed to get four good plants out of the flat in the end i got them in the star growing pretty well but one of these holes here now slugs do love these but i've been you know it's been pretty hot pretty dry not really slug weather and i've also been put in the pellets down the iron phosphate ecofriendly slug pellets which are pretty darn effective so i'm always on the lookout for the cabs looper worm particularly i start noticing they just don't look right and you know you see this this new leaf coming in here that's all curly just doesn't look great somehow and so and then i see holes so i start looking and sure enough they're hard to find in fact i doubt the camera can pick it up but right here these microscopic little caterpillar's are these things this is the larvae of the diamondback ma imported cabbage and these guys are exactly the color of the cabbage leaf that's probably why you can't see them right now and at  they're very hard to spot except for the little holes that they're creating in the shot whole effect is a dead giveaway so fortunately this is one of the easiest pests in the garden to deal with if you ask me  borne bacteria which happens to produce a little protein molecule under the electron microscope it looks like a very sharp razor blade diamond and that's in fact how it works on the gut of  lepidoptera species moss butterflies they're caterpillar's they have to eat this stuff so you've got to get good coverage and you've got to reapply after the rain but give it a good spirits here and it's not going to kill him outright like and it's so it's a sort of a intestinal toxin form and it's very effective you can tell immediately on the bigger ones when they see once they eat some of this stuff they stop eating and you'll see on the bigger ones you can see i'm just kind of sitting on the leaf and they don't look so hot they've they they get a little flat and you know i've lost the will to live and so i keep a sharp eye out brassicas basically are vulnerable to this so give me a good spread send your reply after the rain but it'll clean them up real quick you'll see the little white butterflies  flitting around in off of posting on these things and that's also a good sign that maybe you want to get some p t bacillus there and gensis it's available anywhere usually marketed as caterpillar killer or you know there's goes by a number of names so these are two of my best beats of the egypt flat and what i'd done here beats are a purple perennial biennial plant so they they grow the bulb the first season and they grow seeds the second season so what i did here is a put in a pot and i'm letting those these leaf out no go to seed this fall so i'm starting to select for my two best beets and hopefully i'll get some real primo beats see what kind of follow it see if that works got a little late start this this year but i've been just so you can email me if you want the real garden at yahoo dot com that's all one word in lower case you can also call me after the show after most tuesdays but i've actually got a gig this week  so leave a name and a number and i'll get back to you you can also visit that website w w w dot the real garden dot com there's tips and techniques and all that good stuff get on there and 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