the real garden happy solstice everybody a little past now that you're watching this so the days are getting longer in perceptibly right now but the days are getting longer and that means you know gardens coming up pretty soon here i will be planting peas there at the end of february maybe mid february so you know each year each catalogs out  of their personality this time of year they're just sort of so my dormant and hanging out and fluffed up have enduring the cold and you know as the days get longer will see start to see them  out and if you're interested in having chickens is this spring you know renew that flock or get your first peeps that are so i check that out and in the meantime or you know it's cold outside it's cold and dark now after a rather freakish december you know we've not gotten a lot of rain hardly any rain at all and usually that means very cold temperatures and we've it's been cold but not particularly cold for this time of y and after a couple snappy nights here by the time you're watching this is going to be back into the sort of forty is it night fifty isn't the day kind of sequence a little more rain moving in and also it's wet froze so it's now a sort of a hard top over the garden are looking under there and the plants are weathering very well they haven't really gotten that hard snappy stuff that knocks even the cold hard plants tells you know nobody they don't talk to people i just read a lot that's how i gather all this information so occasionally my pronunciation is bad itself just because it's celery lettuce or asparagus romaine or  was doing a lot more research because these leaves are so tasty in the baby green stage here when i was researching the crop and it turns out you're actually you're growing these for the the big fleshy stem at the end of the life cycle just before they you know sort of like other lettuce is when they're about to bloom go put out that big question stem which normally is woody and stringy and a normal lettuce with these guys it's it's like you know it's edible it's you can you fresher in a stir fry or whatnot and so they had you know i saw pictures of big bundles of these stocks and about this being around you know with a few of these leaf tips hanging off and that's what they're really supposed to look like but the leaves are and this is just coming out of sort of the third harvest of these outer leaves you know this kind of what i've been doing have been going on with a pair of scissors rather than just mowen them down since these are nice big leaves have been you know kind of cutting them off at that stage so i've gotten like three harvests off these these of stayed indoors for no particular reason other than i've got a light under the light bench so they've been able in a lot more active growing you know  down here it is a ball me fifty seven degrees which is perfect let us growing whether i should put them outside to check their hardness some point but at this point what i want to point out is this is a there and then in the mycelium crept found any of the wounds on these cut plants and and the flat was too wet and i didn't have enough air circulation in the greenhouse so i got the sort of fungal mat problem  which has been pretty much solved with putting in pam i brought them indoors warmed him up put a fan on him pulled what fungus my cilia off i could through all that away and then treated with the light actively growing leaves you transpire a lot more moisture so the flat is prone to drying out and this is just when you want to catch these you'll just see a couple leaves you know look and see what happens is the water they start to do that you'll see the same thing on these cold mornings plants cold hard plants instinctively poll water out of the cells of the ground parts of the plant because they know the colds coming they pull the water out so they don't get that bursting bottle effect in intercellular level so what this guy needs as is a little water i've been showing you that i've sort of the you know the blue plant food kind of fertiliser use it indoors because it's not stinky and in mild solutions it's not going to hurt anything but what i noticed here one of the  other signal that you need to water is this coconut coyer turns a very light brown and turns to back to dust here and in between that coconut see sort of a little bit of think you'll see a little white patch the plants it's in organic it doesn't have a carbon molecule the plant takes it up very readily but it can also come out of solution due to the capillary action of the of the soil as that water dries out through the top it draws this these salts to the surface so at this point whereas i you know normally and ideally water from the bottom at this point i'm going to do a top watering to try to flush the soil little bit although salts back down and recycle back into the income that's what it suggests i'm going to do it sort of gently with my little you know hose bottle here so i'm not splashing the leaves and getting you know a lot of grit on those but first thing we need to do is a mix up some soil and somebody was asking me about soil last week by email and i was talking about perlite light as a puff volcanic rock  and i use a lot of the no matter what soil you use you know this is my recycled mix over here you can you know get you know store bought potting mix or mix your own or whatever but no matter what you start off with perlite it's a good additive  this mix actually has perlite already in it i'm going to put even more in and this is i'm using this specifically like if you're getting us commercial mix from the nursery this is about what i would do with it  and the reason i'm experiment with a little more per like i said the soil has very light in it already i'm going to put a little more in just because those flats are holding a little more moisture than i'd like them to very extensive root system for what we're doing you know we're not growing these really to full size of what i've been doing is just taking raw seed from the package and planting misting it down and and then not top putting a topper on it for twenty four hours i put it under the lights because lettuce is a those who watch the show know this so what we're doing here is we're putting them you know the dry seed on a more east cutting pattern paper towel i put a single paper towel layer on top moistened that and under the lights and then these are just about forty eight hours old i didn't see any roots yesterday but today we've got you know like ninety percent germination this is exactly where you want to catch them where their roots are just barely showing and then you can just planted like a dry seed without any special treatment you know have to really you know fuss with which direction the roots pointing at this stage they'll they'll figure it out so we're going to do as  these we can obviously cover right away in this particular case so i'm just going to start knocking these in here i've got about thirty seed here so i'm going to plant three rows of ten experimental with you know how far apart these things go you know do we saw him think do we saw  and it's kind of depends on the variety for instance those sell to this i planted at a fairly interval not unlike what we're doing here although i know weekend week out i have a start start these projects on camera it takes me three hours that night to finish them all so you know it you might not even need lights for lettuce you might be able to do these on a go window sill a bit of recycled ground coconut husks comes in a sort of a solid block you know that's the remains of the block and once you had water it falls apart into this nice fine dusty stuff  leaves really clean it tells you when it needs watering by you know when it turns to that lighter color you know that it's time to water want just the fines and not bills longer fibrous can just you can even just have shake it out of your flat so that way you get a nice fin covering for those smaller seeds bigger seeds you know when you're potting up plants don't seem to make a difference but those little scenes like you know sometimes those bigger fire risk can be obstructive and now we water from the bottom main thing the plants need this one soon to be nitrogen so i'm just going to give them sort of a little starter  a lot of stuff needing a heat requirement in fact it doesn't like for germination so down here it's you know fifty to sixty degrees as you for the for lettuce and most of the cool weather crop see those up and running in a week or so all right left that was to the mystery seed from the windshield so some i've been dying to do for i don't know a year now in fact i can tell by the little packets i made here but it was just about a year ago you know there's little christmas wreath on a point sort of on sale from last year and i found these seeds in the  you know where you filled your your windshield wiper fluid in the car you know under the hood there and then you dump the stuff through a little screen you know into the tank for the windshield wiper fluid well something had collected this lovely bundle of just one kind of seed and placed them in the screen of this windshield wiper tank it's a shiny sea it's a nice seed in the something did a great job of collecting these and i thought wow perhaps this is the you know biofuel plants of the future or something you know they look a little oily and nice hard shiny seeds so let's start i'm up and see what they are and see  just to get them up and running basically just holds moisture in air in the proper proportions there so again you know we're go couple here on the dial so or so we're just going to tap a few of these things out will see it's what it is we're out of time you can email me if you want the real garden at yahoo dot com it's all one word in lower case you can also call me if so i listen for the phone after the tuesday even so you can also visit that website to check out that new chicken project w w w dot the real garden dot com we'll see you next week