chicken bouquets easy there girl plan today just to show you kind of what happens with these things you know this is what the route was what we used in the winter cold all the green leaves off but the  chickens but inside here you get a sort of a and b little heart in there so clear went back on the les this week it's late a couple like we might check for eggs at the end of the show today might have left us a little surprise point he turns nine this year the other two are eight and by the speaking of turning eight this show is eight years old and we recently turned eighteen and a couple  how long can this go on  so we have a pretty heavy agenda so i think what i'll do as i say about this is i can just leave it for him and they can get little bites off of it to the it's heavy enough for him but  but the first thing on the agenda is back here so let's take a look at the compost i haven't built a big compost pile for a while and i usually don't have all the materials to go for an effective hot compost you need to get it up to know you need about a cubic foot for yard or whatever it is about this much to get a good hot pile going i'm going up because i do have a of gold dairy and i also have some poultry now the and which is why you want to hot pile you know to kill any microbes any of the bad actors so i've got a thermometer in here and when i started this we're in about fifty eight degrees down here as you can see it's been a couple days and we're right about one hundred now so this pile is heating up we're heading towards part you know one twenty up leaves from last fall and i'm stored waiting for an occasion like this i've got some surplus dairy manure from a friend and i've got poultry manure in here from the girls and i also have some old chicken all good now when i pull this the first and last thing i did was i took the bags from the leaves bag from the chicken feed some newspaper that was in the chicken manure and i made a little blanket for it and then poured water on top so that the paper got nice and moist so that top layer doesn't dry out here and you can see a little bit of the chicken feed the leaves and boy this is really warm in fact if i pull this apart you already see some sometimes you'll see steam coming off of it i don't see that but it is significantly warmer than the outside temperature try to keep it nice and fluffed up you know as you're building this don't pack it down at all or anything you want to lot of oxygen in there to keep it sweet s is a cover crop in fact the next thing we're going to look at is just that i had a lot of corn salad this kind of go rogue on me this is all corn salad grows great during the winter and this time of year it's starting to pull and go to bloom he gets rangy like this and it's just about time for all this to go away but as paul on this stuff realised this stuff has a massive fibrous root system really tiny little roots now this does not come back from the roots so what i've been doing is i've been polling just the greenery off kind of snapping it off at the soil level and leaving those roots behind because those are going to decompose very quickly and build the soil i'm actually going to start promoting corn salad maybe as a cover crop for this very reason you know you can eat it during the winter and then it leaves this big  roots which is what we're planting through here just kind of plugs and stuff in do a little garden on the way to the garden i pulled all the corn salad i hear discovered i had some of those perennial perennial lies chicken reason we're also found the lettuce that we've been grown since i don't know february i think those went in and so the chard in a few lettuce is from your last fall i think those will neglected and that's all there is to it there are some seed down and covered up a little bit now i did pull some of those roots those matted roots aside they can decompose over somewhere else i don't want to be clogging up my spinach seed here just go this time of year and then an edible chrysanthemums i've had hanging around i was bored in the winter and grew some of these out way too early so they've been  i just loosen those roots up a little bit and not plug them in on the side because i think this thing is should get fairly large if they keep it picked off don't let it complete its life cycle and you can kind of just live on the side here and  we can have full chrysanthemum blooms during the summer and fall months i think i hope so i've got three of them i'll stick those three on the side and then every week i'll plug something new in   the cabbages and back in the garlic in front here there is a like a ninety day rule if you're using a freshman or nothing that you're going to harvest within ninety days and  gets the freshmen or compost is fine of course and then you know obviously this doesn't go on your lettuce you know something that you're going to not cook puts directly in your mouth you use common sense wash all your stuff anyway so this is the re graph this is one that didn't work i read grafted it and i did use it angle cut on this and this guy just took off he just like snapped right into place and took half the time to heal and now i could see that huge i could feel it sticking to something so i had to be really careful just carefully twist him off but you can see where the scar is where the joint is and here i didn't even i had a little gap but he managed to heal up despite a little gap and then the other thing that's happening here is the graft this at the root stock is trying to put out a little sucker from below the graft see that little leaf sticking out that can turn into a big branch and you don't want that coming off of the rootstocks i'm just going to clean them up a little bit here get that off then the other interesting thing that ice point out is that the root stock has sprouted roots which happens sometimes you know as as i've mentioned on several shows these will try combs the fur on the stem of the tomato turn into roots if they're in see if i can very carefully and gently with all those off trim those back a little because they're going to dry out anyway don't want to be tugging on this ok we'll leave it at that so there's there he goes now you get full light gets a good watering at this point and he'll be actively growing as the red pear grafted onto a boat for bedding straw had this herbicide in it so you can do a test for it and what i do as i grab a bunch handful stronach put in a blender and chop it up real fine and then i put in you know like a third straw for this blended straw into my usual seating mix which i know works so i know how plants behave in it and we're going to do a bio acid using some seeds  a stick you know since these are going to be grown for transplant we're going to stick a bunch of seed because all we need to do is see how they behave in the next you know for about a week after emergence you know putting on that first true talk those guys in top mock it's a mix water those in good and then put them on a heat mat at about eighty just to speed him up because i want to know pretty quick here water that in and for instance that i only did this a few days ago with tomatoes and eighty they sprouted while i was at work today which is why they're looking they were in the dark so that's why they look like that so i've got a wonderful light straight up like normal tomatoes do and i've never had a problem with the wheat straw but something that you know a bale a straw is a lot of material if you start spreading it around everywhere and it's got something in it it's probably not so that's what i see and interesting we've been growing the lyceum barrier for a while out in the yard and those are all from seed and i've been in the seeds hard enough to get going it germinates readily but it's hard to get a good bush going it takes a few years and lose a few on the way so i really wanted to see if starting to butt out and put a little bit of green on that i was pruning them i thought well i'll try you know i've tried other soft cutting in water i've tried hard winter cuttings which have worked but this is noticed there was actually one of these roots was growing through the plastic bag this is packed in coconut coyer i did put a little rope rooting hormone on the ends here but these guys are actually poking through the bag let's see what they're doing been sitting on the bench you know away from the light bench  the other is i think oh just put them back in they're doing they're doing the right thing to go put them back in i'll be all more careful with the roots next time and when i get a little more extensive root system to years ago and these are the progeny of that just an interesting whole species pretty white flower almost perennial in this climate not quite this stuff however does seem to be a hardy in illinois northern illinois coming back in from around february or march so this stuff is pretty hearty and there's also  part that you take for this is for the vivid dreams as a foam that forms on the top of the water when you're whip it up so we're going to top this with a little you know i put about you know tiny seed i don't know what they're going to do so i put you know fifteen in each cell just see what's going to happen i mean my luck they probably will all come up but for now you know they can this is served sort of a you know you would make a whole salad out of this but you might put a little bit in your salad it's posed to be good with eggs and fish so i've never grown it we'll see what happens an hour they'll be pretty much the right moisture and yeah the the time to use the peppers the peppers i had to kick some tomatoes out into the greenhouse because i'm running out of room and i've got four or five flats of peppers yet to go plants but those two plants have been excellent as long spoony mustard you know brassica family thing it's kind of in between spin agents bok choy a and but the thing is ongoing everbearing sort of thing so the seeds are small round black just like all the kale crops you know the cabbages the cabbage seed in my garden and can get some decent seeds in this species normally i don't put the seeds in my hand that was just for them and storing soon because the seeds can go back in the you can email me if you want real gardening yahoo dot com that's all one word lowercase oh yeah and so i listen for the phone half of the tuesday evening show but you can always leave a name number question comment on the answering machine also visit that new