welcome to the real garden a frosty january day partly clear partly cloudy and not too bad it's not in the teens or twenties or anything you know and when you get those clear nights you pay for it the cooler temperatures so good it seems to have a little it's working a little later shift these days it's hard to get home and get anything done grows rather large you know these later in the spring these leaves will get you know if the team inches long and about seven inches wide and they'll bill retain their fairly mild i think she ate it but i think she prefers the end i fear stuff but the leaves will die back if it gets cold enough and that's usually when i dig them this when are they have been sort of an evergreen variety your veggies cleo all right we do have gardening to do let's go out and do it go out to the frozen mud patch and transform transform grab one on the end here to all that might come in handy but one of these ten guys pulled one a few weeks ago and it's still a pretty so small baby it's one of these and ones we're getting plenty of won't get the grocery size column of belgian end which is what this is going to turn into but you know if we're going to do this one we'd twist off most of the leaves get down to that plant center there take any trash you know in the warmer temperatures it will of course start to grow rapidly in the dark and you'll get that oh i am just chick on you can even see basically we're looking at a baby belgian and dive right there but this will grow from the energy stored in the roof it's a good way to store the summer's energy in the root and then you can produce good greens in the winter it's one of my favorite crop that it's under utilized and i'm always talking about it plus it's excellent chicken green these are fairly for any you know once you get them going so i always leave you know a few around the yard you know just for chickens and greens so let's work our way back in with some other stuff that the musters winter greens go and yeah this is just sort of a wild patch that i planted all my old one batch you know sort of late august everything jumped up and grew real well during the warm warm september you're seeing curly mustard smooth mustard some box choice still mixed in there i  big heads of broccoli you get many many little florets like this very tender very sweet favorite of camera for i have this floating row cover over this bed for the so let me pencil this which is this stuff that got planted into the bed rather late in the season you can see it tried to bloom this fall which is when it normally blooms and it's only alive by the grace of the good weather we've been having lack of hard frosts so i'm limping along i'm hoping to get seed off this it's this is an you know the growth slows down and at that point you know the slug damage go to the new growth of the plant doesn't keep up the flood damage so if you start to see in the holes in your final cabbage like this it's time to polish what we're going to do is i'm going to try to get down here at the base and you know maybe one more thing that's loose like that and maybe even since i'm that was got slug damage on it that's pretty that you can see that the it turns purple more purple where it gets sunlight and the slug holes in this leaf actually did a little stencil letting the sunlight through one of the green cabbage very nice very nice polka dot cabbage i should train specially trained slugs you always seem to have the variety pack of cabbage i always get you know one or two big ones and a couple of small you know growing right next to each other i right which point thanks for clearing this stuff out and i pull this stuff up by the roots and what'll happen is this stuff will continue to grow even from here and then  after it's got a little more nubbins on it i'll go ahead and give it to the chicken this is basically the time of year for you know if you've got nothing better to do you know you got to be planting anything that's a good time to get out turn the soil see what you're dealing with and wondering where this one was and is pull battery is dead or it's just been out here in the rain too much great thing to have it's a little soil thermometer that works most the early seeded spring things are going to be planning things like peas mustards lettuces you want to soil temperature of about fifty degrees before you get going we're a long way from that point for a day i like to pull the mulch away and i can reuse that mixed in with the straw and so you're seeing a little bit of wheat grow in there wheat is a good cover crop and i do grow it intentionally  and as you can see there's a lot of this root mass down here in the spring i'll chop this down with a weed whacker and to get into the soil leaving the roots in for a week or two and all that stuff decomposes it also seems to have a good relationship with the micro rise or one guy all these roots that i see you know kind of have a little almost a sheath of  know life growing around them you know these are the beneficial fun guy that interact with the plant roots they get a little bit of sugar you know carbon sourced from the plants who can photosynthesize and then  basically this is a slightly raised bed i don't put lumber around in the garden because lumber jack spencer move and it's kind of hard to dig with the sides like that i think so i kind of look at this level here and you know you can see i've got maybe four or five inches of raised beds when the soil is getting tired you know with the carbon reserve so if i see a a flatbed i know that i need to get some more material in there and again that's kind of what the prep cover crops are doing they're making those sugars and the carbon from the sun literally out of thin air you know they're taking the soil is basically made up of living and did my friends so much better up take a look at it you know i'll give that a day or two under plastic to dry out a little bit  probably put a little compost in there little bit of lime and mix it up again and who knows maybe will be planting some culture early something in the next week or two i've got talk about this garlic i got from somebody and here we are in january so i'm kind of place for it was actually going to put it in the bed that we just dug but that's where i had the garlic rust last year so i'm thinking that's probably not a good idea so what i've done is i've gone not my charred out of the garlic varieties and i've decided i've got an extra row of huge red wedding in here that i'm go poll and put in some of this good russian red somebody gave me and so first i got to find the corresponding day and there it much top growth going yet but down here we've got you know an extensive root system starting and it's looking good so you can see the skin does rot off you know down there in the soil  because this guy's going to grow a head of garlic so he doesn't need that anymore so that's kind of paul the easy plug and the other ones as we go got a pretty good idea because they plant seven cloves per row so what we're doing is we're got this beautiful head of hard neck garlic which is stored beautifully you know and i'm assuming this was harvested about the usual time either you know mid mid july to her early august and and here you've got the individual cloves with hard neck  like to kind of wiggle that woody stem helps separate flows a little bit and careful you want to keep that skin on as much as you can to that those checks closed during the early days and you really want to be careful of the bass here because that's where your roots are so you don't want to screw that up and you can see that came off very well intact and you can already see that basler material a little root nodes this is embarrassing i can't find my clothes to make things go faster and these are going to end you know about three times the size of the height of the ball so you know one two three maybe not quite so but they will certainly come up if you plant them a little be worry about that here's one with top growth so he's already got his roots down and is starting to come up so we're going to start seeing some emergency here another couple weeks february which is just about right you know to keep them straight you got to keep them separate so we're out of time you can e mail me if you want the real garden at yahoo dot com that's all one ordinal or case you can also call me after the show and listen for the phone after the tuesday evening show you can also visit that website w dot the real garden dot com with the pictures of chickens and write ups on the techniques we'll see you next week