yesterday i haven't even check so now we planted the tomato grafts last week is a great timing man they're under plastic under a growth mind you but  indoors and get a nice healthy flat and i pot him up into the three or four inch pots and they spend anywhere from a month to month and a half the pending on how far behind i am putting them up and how late the seasons are running right now she was looking pretty red the face she looked all bleached out the same afternoon but in this light she looks a little better and always tell from the facial coloration whether they're playing or not  they get red in the face and combs wattles and then they'll bleach out as they lay close looking a little bleached today but i think she laid today too she's been doing sort of a two out of three doze off poor thing nine years old like three hundred years old and chicken years so she may be on the retirement plan here you're still my favorite don't tell the others all right let's take a look at what's going on with our single a quick look at the compost pile for we head out i built a nice big one few weeks ago and somebody had some spare washed dairy manure and i had some old leaves hanging around and some chicken manure and and some chicken feet as you can see the chicken feed sprouted it was some of that  the mash stuff but the whole grain stuff but it was really old so i put it in there and that's ok they'll come to chop that up when i turn this little just turn into more nitrogen materials for me school will you know being sprouts for the compost bin and you know we started right almost to the top here about seven eighths fold and you can see we've dropped a good half a foot as far as the volume of this the temperature has gone up to about one hundred twenty five and it's coming back down to about one fifteen right now so i thought i'd poke at it a little bit and as soon as i did the first thing i noticed my my little air ration thing you know this thing goes in skinny comes out that you're supposed to kind of pull it out and air it the thing the thing got stuck this thing is really collapsed on itself those leaves of you know kind of shingle second you can see it needs turning because some of this is dried out it's got a nice mold on it and stuff but it is starting to dry out whereas other places are wet and anaerobic in fact but the camera person's nose is wrinkling at this point the situation is clear itself up completely in a couple days so nothing you can do about it don't put line on it line actually will not go hide you know it raises the ph which is not the hydrogen molecule off of a little something real quick this sort of a technical job well let's plant something in the garden last we could put a few spinach seeds in and i put a bunch of seeds in i don't know maybe fourteen a couple weeks ago we circled in these christmas edible chrysanthemums and i only put one in and show saying a plant the other two and of course i never did because they've been in the pot so long i planted these back in january  was bored now they're starting to stunt and they're starting to bolt you know they think they're they've used up the environment that they were given the small little pot they're thinking and what i'm going to do is i'm going to put one bloom make some seed for next year and call it done and any time you've got a plant like this whether it's your tomato or pepper this time of year that you've got at the nursery you want to remove that first bloom because you want these to grow bigger means you can see this guy's right at the  stan got the little blossom starting and he hasn't even you know started to open or really even form yet so we're going to remove him right away what that's going to do is perhaps hopefully throw this into a more of a vegetative mode because now he says well i lost my flower so now i'm going to grow some more produce another flat and produce more energy and produce another flower so and the second thing that's going to happen it's going to branch out from these little nodes here so let's go ahead and plug this guy in as well through quick and put in these kind of on the side because i'm thinking these are going to hopefully be sort of a all season sort of thing we're going to pluck these edible blooms off in the leaves are edible to they had sort of an interesting to use when i tried one but you know we've got a nice root system here nice white healthy roots  s this is a an italian a roach aromatic it sort of gets to be a longer string you're sort of almost like a thick grass looking thing this isn't something you'd make your whole salad out of but you put a little bit in your salad supposed to go with the eggs and fish and that sort of thing so i've never tried it before i'm going to try it upon further research i found out it can be perennial particular in this climate i'll probably put out a nice taproot and be perennial so we're going to kind of again push this off into my experimental side of the garden kind of thing and you know i planted these thickly as you can see because i didn't know  what kind of germination i was going to get or anything i'm going to bother to do in these out too much but i might split them you know split them up like into half a plug each i might lose one that will space them out a little bit here you just  plug in a man you know around the other stuff that i'm going to let grow you know the salad gardens nice because everything's pretty compatible which is going to stand them up a little bit and you know they're going to they're going to look at me funny when i start watering a man they're going to fall down a little bit i'm going to have to come in and kind of probably give them a little micro mulch and stand them up a little bit you know just give me the ground they're pretty tough this age i want to transplant them early specially if they have a tap or this guy will just plug in a hole what the heck to see if that works better or worse or if they spread or get this kind of an experimental pla they're just real quick things going into the garden bed if you're always planning something then he always be able to harvest something and you don't need a great big head of lettuce you need a constant supply of a few let's take a look around real quick as we walk back to the next instalment here the peas are doing great as usual the cots are way ahead of anything else they do kind of hardly looks like it but i do kind of come in kind of makes you know anything that can fit behind a string so it's following the trail as they will these are growing so fast a lot of times sometimes i'll see one that's too short one day and then  the think this once the snow pea and the snap peas and back then i've got sort of something that was described as a little bit of both tally and variety in the middle and they're finally starting to take off  seem to appreciate a little warmer weather than the showing peat they're running late everything's running late but i was actually going to rotate peppers into their end and all of those can perform the next four weeks i might actually small pot he thinks he's done for the season as far as space that he's going to get and he's trying to put out a bloom these are all indeterminate tomatoes and that was actually  actually the organ spring this one's one of the only determinant that i've got and even still i'm going to pull this first blossom off a pot this got up into a patio to make them bigger so you don't want them put the blooms out yet again here's another one way up there i'll let that develop because they'll just rip the branch off but the first blossom or two will come off too early if you only want so that bloom will come off but this is a brandywine you know the classic determinant big beef steak type tomato excellent tomato and a classic form even though it does have sort of the semi potato beef not going to you know one method of pruning it's made was only allow the main stem so anything like this that's coming off any of the suckers would be pruned off only let these blossoms form along the main stem and that's one way of doing it is good if you've got a lot of plants close together into a string this a lot of greenhouses do do it that way but with this method we're going to do something different and i got this from the   an eye for an into approximately eighteen branches and the reason i've chosen this made it was because it almost perfectly represents the six into six would be like the classic tomato shape so what we're going to do is we're going to let each of these branches will skip this one because you know that was sort of a servant in please leave anyway so we'll keep the sucker off of here will let this and those all split into two once they get out of the cage and get big enough to want to split those each go into two which gives us twelve and then typically right after this bloom here the  crown at the top is going to generally say fork into two leaders very soon here at that point each of those will get split into three which gives us another six which is eighteen so that's where we're going to get now in the last couple years i had to wait tight and sometimes a branch is either weak or is just crowding so i get down to like fourteen fifteen this year i've only got the two plants in the two cages so they're going to get at least that eighteen you know so we can fill out the space so here's the finished thing last week we planted the tomatoes and put cages wrapped in plastic on wonder when goes on top this is like  section of pages on once the tomatoes get up taller in this thing guy wires hold down because obviously this thing standing up on a ten foot tower you know it's pretty good in the wind it's been through this if necessary today was pretty close to seventy degrees i opened it up like a little teak the door maybe but i didn't pull it back this far we do have adequate ventilation at the top here i've got about four inches rootstock with the telly and read pair sign on stock on top i think they've actually grown a little in the especially in the last couple days they've been in the ground for a week they're certainly not suffering at all i've been maintaining a soil temperature of about fifty two degrees at night and sixty five in the daytime so we're really starting to gain some growth here  you know i plan to have this on for another few weeks probably it's the only danger is that you don't want the plastic on the plant and that's the other reason i'm really liking the one plant the middle of the cage  to have to worry about that they're in their own little environ there you get a sort of a flabby plant if it's and you can get out pathogens building up on that moisture between the plastic and the leaf so  finally cleared up hasn't been amended but it has been covered so not much nutrient is leached away but you know it's getting a little tired and i'm going to need to get some compost in here and just for the carbon factor but before you know most of my beds i've been amending i'm pretty confident at the nutrient levels but this one i don't know you could i could be a little tired so what i do is i take a little sample you know i can't go just below the surface and down to maybe five six inches and i take it from a couple different places in my official calibrated all of chart here  just trying to get a mark on there that i'm looking for so i'm going to make a fifty fifty slurry here with distilled water notice this is also a good way to look at the structure of your soil the first thing to sink is going to be sand which is the larger particles in a few minutes the silt will form a layer which is served in between particle and then the clay is what stays suspended for a long time it might not be twenty four even forty eight hours before the water starts to clear and you'll see that been layer of clay or thick layer of clay my soil is very sandy it's a nice sandy easy to work with so i've got a thick sand layer very thin clay layer got a clay soil it will be reversed so i let that sit and then when i do you can just minutes and it gives it's just a lot easier to read the test and all i need is five lea a fish aquarium test for nitrate the most available form of nitrogen ten drops of solution is number one in there just follow the instructions tube basically and what's going to happen is whatever color this turns i compare it to my little nitrate color chart that's already turning in orange you can see this isn't parts per million