we have these chickens don't like the snow they've decided that this is non threatening enough they can come out and play a little bit you know a little treat here we are right at the end of february she is not in today was going to be the people entering day really do that on the show but she got to be light on your feet if you're going to be a gardener in this climate january that's early but i don't know i know is that the really early plantings you know they they will germinate they will come up and then the look really ticked off for a while  cleo cheese and then later on the later plantings will catch up with the earlier plantings and everybody just kind of grows according to you know degree days so i've got to move my planting back it used to be january then it was groundhog's day then it's valentine's day well she's feeling the routes you lamie smacks here soon cleo miss i started to molt july fourth who went off the lane last summer look i'm pretty fluffy their kid we are getting close here at least for you know younger chickens usually start laying about mid march cleo here does usually click on first lately clicks off early may not years old these chickens so we will just have to see what they've got left and i'm and take a quick look outside and then let's hunker down inside for a while thirty eight degrees a little chilly for germination even for peace but maybe i'll put a little end cap on that and see if i can get a little solar right ization going once we've got some peace in the ground  d garlics up let's look at the garlic spoke about the snow there is one there's another hey there's bunches  there it's getting to the teens tonight i might bring a flat or two of those in stores even for tomorrow night after that they've been holding up pretty good so let's do a little follow up last week we got cut off  time on my artichoke discovery and so let's talk about that first i have potted up what i thought were my prime seeds and these are all two inch pots individually and have them on the heat mat and  you know everything should have worked great and then i put the rest on cotton after twenty four hours so the rest of the seed and put them on the heat that too and  are this is the nursery pot it put together out of the ones that sprouted on cotton and you know i was getting you know ninety ninety five percent germination on the cotton and these little pots with what i thought were the prim didn't work so well i've had a few come up but i was sixteen i only had maybe three or four come up that's not very good so what i do is start going down and look in here and the first thing maps i'm not going to do it now but i was registering about eighty degrees temperature which if you look at a glancing chart that should be excellent you know artichoke germination temperatures swim got a little dry  but i start digging around finding out what's going on down here you know and for that seed there is some look at this little artichoke clean him off and take a look at him nothing seems to be wrong i did find a couple that had rotted out and they just kind of timed out and rotted out and that's sure about this one  good way to do it it gives magnification on it looks a little roddy i'm looking at the pointy end where this where the radical root would generally come out of you know put a thumbnail on it fight did was i pulled several of these seeds out of the little individual pots that were registering about eighty degrees i put him back on cotton since that was what was looking good you know i have one of these old cosmetic pads down the bottom there's one of the seeds that i had pulled out and i had three or four seeds i pulled out put them on the cotton one what i did was i put the temperature probe from my indoor outdoor thermometer slipped that in there under the cotton and put that directly on the heat pad the way the others had been i found that i was getting a consistent temperature of eighty five to eighty nine degrees and so  apparently even though the planting chart you know for the artichoke says seventy five to eighty you know sixty five to eighty degrees that extra five to nine degrees really did the trick as far as getting these things up and running and growing in a healthy way so you know spectacular success on cotton at a higher temperature i think was the key not so good success at a lower temperature in the pot know we've got some nice seedlings going here like that i like that one i like that one and i like this one and see how they've already got a pretty good set of first leaves coming on whereas for instance this guy little higher temperature for the artichoke don't be afraid which is weird because our chunks don't necessarily like heat in the pro cycling actually grow better better and go down the commercial growing for artichokes is down in northern california where it actually enjoy the coastal influence the fogs and the little cooler summers so interesting though for the germination you want them a little higher so let's up do another set i found just real quick here i found of some old artichoke seed let's see if it's still viable so i'm doing as i'm using cosmetic rounds from the grocery store  just real quick we'll just go through the follow ups this is the tomatoes that we're grown that we planted last week so this is one week gone we've got one hundred percent germination in fact we've got one hundred ten percent germination because i could've sworn i only planted one seed in the cell but lo and behold i've got two i have had double embryos with tomato seeds before so i have to see if that's from one plant or two or some sort of sort of siamese twin or what this one still hasn't emerged he's bent up but he hasn't got his leaf out that's probably because this guy sprouted real quick way ahead of these so i had to pull him out and put him under the lights so they went from a nice you know seventy five eighty degree temperature to a sixty five degree temperature and that has slowed these guys down quite a bit this guy's kind of just in status right now i might put him back on the heat map tonight when the lights go off to try to get him up and running now the advantage here is if you do cool the tomatoes down like this as soon as they emerge you get these nice squat seedlings they don't get leg a little cooler plenty a light and you'll get a nice squat seedling which is what you're looking for these are going to be container plants for the greenhouse both are our early varieties one specifically for containers both are determined which means they only grow so big they tend to blossom in a shorter period of time  and with a set number of possums and then the right wing is fairly calm packed time wise so good to grow a couple different determinant varieties one early one medium one late if you're going to go this route let's keep an eye on those asparagus up and running this is some old asparagus seed that i started spiritus is a good thing to start early because it is you know you're really not could get asparagus this year it's more either next year or the year after that only allowing the crowns to get big and have enough energy to you know give you some asparagus spears in the spring so these are some seedlings from seed most people buy crowns but i like to groan from see you get a nice fresh crown that way and you get to pick your bride is a little better that way this is her coach a de argentine an italian variety they've had success with and as you can see they look grass some of them are even perennial in it's got these sort of corn like kernels although they've got a tough husk on them and these will grow in a little zigzag pattern at the tuft of the grass  d the reason i'm growing these out is because we've got we're going to grow some corn out this year just to keep my seed stock right this is what hakan green corn which we these are just serving germination and fields which is you know the corns genetic motherland will actually allow these to grow in the fields and they will cross pollinate they are close enough to corn where  genetic variety so that's what i've tried this a few years ago and thought i'd try it again the scent a has a very long season i'm not sure if i don't think i ever did get seed off of it so i'm starting a very early and kind of grow grow in pots until it's warm enough to go outside and then i'll you know cope plant it with some corn probably transplants with it and it's going to infect the roots and ivette official manner as mike rises should do but i've always had doubts as far as the dormancy and the shelf life of these things are usually fairly expensive and as far as the actual proof in the putting i'm always kind of wonder so these two pots of corn they were put on cotton till they sprouted just checked germination then i potted some up this is the  control which is doing very nicely maybe a little phosphorus deficiency here i'm seeing with the reddening of the leaves maybe a little early nitrogen deficiency which i've corrected you can see the yellow of the older leaves but the new leaves look pretty good and some great tilling roots poking out through the bottom this is sort of a indian corn from mexico which it is pretty tough stuff very vital stuff so looking good on the control and it's the mike arise all treated no i got to say that even though i was trying to match the seedlings in the pots the seedlings here did kind of start out a little wonky you can see one kind of had trouble it was a little behind although he's looking pretty good maybe a different little different genetic make up there because he doesn't have any of the reddening that the others have a the roots of plant they are a little sugar from the plant which the fungus can produce and in exchange they go out as the network basically increasing the surface area of the plants roots by tens and even so definitely a benefit for a lot of plants if you can get these things to inhabit the roots plant so and you can see them with a microscope and i will be looking for you know spore elation at the end of the life fair open it up we've got a little hatch out here saying there's the little babies right there one two actually there's one that didn't make it got along and i went and been feeding him a little sour chicken mash and they were churning and burn and eat and stuff now they've kind of gone into hybrid into pubic ation and i've been keeping them on the heat mat at about eighty to eighty five degrees and a couple of hatched out now whether they're meeting and doing their thing i don't know yet the adults life cycles about five to seven days and so i'm you know the piece of cardboard in there that they happen to be hanging out on is there for them to lay their eggs on they won't lay their eggs in the good in the waste materials that the grubs eat but they will lay them right light to mate do their mating dance and that sort of thing so what i've done here is i've taken the black lid off this coffee can and i've put a little because this is actually there goes my rubber band this is actually  live day or even two days to get them to sprout before and plant is very similar to what i do with the seeds on cotton and i had such terrible success with the snap and snow peas last year i thought maybe i'd try it we're going to be planting first the habitat hybrids which are us shelling soupy that's really tough but i'm going to do a little test with just ten seeds of the snow and ten seeds of the snap five of which i will soak and sort of prep and five of which of the plant dry and see if i can't quantify you know an earlier planting for these last year the snow and snap peas rotted out like once twice three times in these early colder temperatures finally got them to grow you know you know when april well by then that's when the haven't got my snow pea or my snappy with that very geisha on it so i continue to every now and then try to introduce more of the snow or snappy characteristics into this hybrid so if these works you know w and then close it back up label it and do it that way and so you know just so you know i've got the mammoth melting snow for p and the super time you can e mail 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 i listen for the phone after the tuesday evening show you can also visit that new bent site that's w w w dot the real garden dot com