Mid-November at Dun Hagan

For all the fact that it was a three day weekend I didn't get much gardening done to show for it.

It wasn't a complete loss though. Friday was mostly taken up with putting in a proper feed room in the workshop. I've been making do since putting together our present poultry flock, but that wasn't going to work any longer once I brought the latest feed purchase home. The price of commodity grains has been steadily rising for months and is beginning to reflect itself in rising feed prices so I laid in the winter's feed before they rose still higher. This was too great an amount for the way I had been doing this so it was time to do it right which required much cleaning and snorting up some serious dust!

The rest of Friday was spent in taking the kids to the park and ice cream afterwards. You have to propitiate them once in a while or they'll get all in your hair when you're trying to get work done. {laughing}

Sunday I finished getting the hoophouse ready for winter. We're predicted to go into the thirties tonight so it was time to be done with it. The power has been run and the heater and fan set up though I may futz with it a few weeks to get it just the way I want it. I moved the hoophouse to just off the carport this year so as to have a shorter run of power line. I am also using a real heater this time instead of the heat lamps such as I've used the last two years. I'm trying to get a bit of thermostatic control on the heat so as to not use so much power until the temperature drops into the high forties. I want to keep the inside of the greenhouse at just above forty five degrees. Below that the roots of citrus plants shut down and growth stops which I want to avoid.

Before I moved everything in I sprayed all of the container citrus and the orchard citrus with horticultural oil in an attempt to head off scale and aphid problems. It's the same sort of oil that one sprays other fruit trees with when they are dormant, but in a lighter concentration because citrus does not really go dormant. When the weather begins to warm next year I'll add a bit of insecticide to head off the citrus leaf miners that plagued me all year this year.

While I was in town this afternoon Diana and the Kinder Major were playing with the camera and took a couple of photos that I thought I'd use here.

The first one is the house after it has been filled. The little fan is hanging from the superstructure and that's the heater in front of the plant bench. The tallest citrus is on the ground on the right and all of the shorter stuff is on the bench. The red pot in the foreground is the big mother aloe. It's five times the size it was when Diana brought it home and I've taken more than twenty babies off of it. Repotting the thing is like petting a porcupine!



The second one is the Kinder Major and the driveway kumquat tree loaded with ripening fruit. The Kinder Minor really loves the things and will happily pick and eat them right off the tree when they're ripe. Or when they're only half-ripe too then gets a puzzled look on her face when they don't taste right! You can bet she remembers them from last year.

This last photo is the Key limes I picked today before spraying the trees. That's a three quart mixing bowl they're in and are only about three-quarters of the total crop. We've eaten the others already. Next year I'll not let them get quite so ripe. Tomorrow I'll juice them all and freeze it.

The container citrus put on really good crops this year and the driveway kumquat as you can see. The orchard citrus on the other hand was very bad. Lots of blossoms, but for some reason they didn't set any fruit. I've been reading up on that and I think I may be able to improve matters come next year.

That was it for the weekend. Not a lot of gardening, but I did get done what really needed it.

.....Alan.

When Life Gives You Lemons...

...and limes then use them! And we have too.

This morning the Kinder Major and I put the new plastic on the hoop house. I'm using cheap builder's plastic to cover it with so it only last seven to eight months which is enough to get through the winter. I'm hoping next year to buy some real UV resistant greenhouse plastic so I'll only have to do this every three or four years.

Cleaning up the frame then stretching the plastic took most of the morning. In the afternoon after Diana and the kids went to visit some family friends I moved all of the container citrus over by the house so I could start prepping it to move in. I had wanted to spray them with hort oil in an attempt to eliminate the leaf miners that have plagued me all year, but the wind picked up later in the day so decided I'd leave it until next weekend. I did fertilize the whole lot though.

To the left here is a photo of one of the Key limes in the foreground with the Eureka lemon behind it both loaded with ripe fruit. I'll be picking all the Keys this week to juice them as they are completely ripe now. We've been using them for weeks and those are the ones we hadn't gotten to yet. The lemons I'll leave a while longer as they've only just now started to color up. Everything we don't eat fresh will be juiced then frozen.

The second photo is the entire container citrus collection as well as my true Bay (Lauris nobilis) and a Cherry of the Rio Grande which is an obscure semi-tropical fruit that I'm growing out as an experiment. If I get good growth over the winter I'll plant it out in the driveway flowerbed next Spring. It's supposed to be cold hardy down to twenty degrees when mature.

You can't really make them out very clearly, but the two little Tahiti (Persian) limes also have fruit that need to be picked before they ripen. I like a ripe Key lime but the Tahiti limes take on an off-flavor if allowed to ripen completely. Both of them just finished blossoming a little while ago so have lots of little fruit on them as well. Also not very clear is the little Meiwa kumquat with a nice fruit set for its size that is just beginning to color up. Hopefully they'll be nice and pretty come Christmas because I want to use it in the house as decoration. I have a larger one in the driveway flowerbed. The Kinder Minor loves the kumquats and has been most put out that we won't let her pick them. She doesn't understand not-quite-ripe yet.

All of the citrus is looking a bit bedraggled at the moment due to the leafminers. I'm hoping to get some good growth over the winter to make them look pretty again.

The final photo is an unobstructed view of the hoophouse. Same one as last year but with new plastic. I'm thinking next year I may build a still larger one incorporating what I've learned from the previous two houses and with a real door.

This evening I processed several dozen bell and pimento peppers and they're now spread on on my largest baking sheets in the chest freezer. Tomorrow I'll move them all into jars for use over the winter. The biggest and nicest of the ripe peppers I used to make the stuffed bell peppers we had for supper tonight.

I think my carrots are finally starting to make their appearance. Or at least I think they're carrots. It's been so long since last I grew them I can't recall what their sprouts look like. I've got a few bare spots in the rows of greens that I'll have to resow. I think the sprinkler washed the seed a bit. Seeing more of the elephant garlic too though still have about have of it yet to break the surface.

Yet another weekend has come and gone.

.....Alan.

El Castillo del los Pollos de Dun Hagan

Which if I have not butchered the Spanish too badly should translate as "The Chicken Castle of Dun Hagan."

Yes, we are back in the poultry business again. I've recovered from the loss of our two previous flocks to predators and have once again taken up hen keeping.

This latest venture started back in February with the annual arrival of day-old chicks at the local farm supply stores. In fact they sort of took me by surprise as I seemed to remember they didn't come in until the beginning of March so I hadn't finished getting the brooder set up. This only took an hour or so then I was ready to go. The farm supply I usually trade with generally purchases Plymouth Barred Rocks, Rhode Island Reds, and "Americaunas" which are really just Easter Eggers (mutt birds that lay green or blue tinted eggs). I picked up ten Barred Rocks, five Rhode Island Reds and two of the Easter Eggers for swank. I also had them order five Buff Orpingtons and five Black Australorps as well as I have particular goals in breeding birds in mind this time around.
This first photo is the inside of the brooder where you can see the chicks not long after I put them in. The darkest colored birds are the Black Australorps (short for Black Australian Orpington), the black and white chicks are the Barred Rocks, the cinnamon birds are the Rhode Island Reds, and the gold/buff chicks are the Buff Orpingtons. You can't really make them out, but the two yellow/white chicks are the Easter Eggers.

The feeders and water sit on top of a hardware cloth frame to keep shavings out of the food and water and to keep the chicks out of any wet bedding if there is a water spill. It's not a perfect solution, but works better than anything else I've come up with so far.

The second and third photos show more of the brooder itself.

The box is based on a full sheet of plywood with another sheet and a half cut to make the walls. The whole thing bolts together with carriage bolts then the inside is lined with sheet plastic. When the brooder is no longer needed I can spread the used brooder bedding on the garden, throw away the used plastic, then disassemble the box to stack flat for storage out of the way. This is the second time I've used it now and it worked pretty much as I had originally planned it which is not the usual for things that I build.

Also shown in the second photo and a closer view in the third photo is the hover the chicks shelter under to stay warm. This is a design the Ohio Cooperative Extension developed in 1942 as a way to improve chick brooding in spite of wartime materials shortages that was rediscovered by Robert Plamondon. The original design was for 200 chicks which was about the average chick flock size on the commercial farms of the period. I downsized it to a fifty chick size which is about as many as I care to handle at one time.

What makes this particular hover interesting is that it allows the chicks to regulate their own temperatures. If they're cold they go further under the hover. If they're hot they move further out. No need for thermostatic control which is expensive and could malfunction. Another bonus is the recessed top allows one to fill it full of dry bedding which serves as insulation. This allows one to use a smaller bulb than otherwise be needed because the rising heat is trapped by the insulation. This also tends to make it somewhat proof against power failures as well. I had a first-hand experience with this about a week after I took the photos when I unwittingly turned their power off one below-freezing morning before I went to work. It was ten hours before I came home to discover my mistake and I fully expected to find a brooder full of dead chicks! To my surprise when I lifted it up I found them all nestled down into the bedding under the hover, cold, but still alive. The overhead insulation in the hover and the dry bedding they dug into had kept them warm until I came home again. I immediately turned the power back on and in about ten minutes they'd warmed up again and were acting completely normal. Had I been using the usual lightbulb hanging overhead like I've always used in the past I'm sure I'd have lost them all.

The four photos to the left show the new henyard and roosthouse. I've given up on total free-ranging poultry until I can get one or more trained livestock guardian dogs. There is just too much predator pressure here for that to work.

So, now what I have is the traditional fenced yard and hen house. When we are home in the evenings before the sun goes down we let the birds out to forage for the last hour or so before they go to roost. This allows them to get the greenfeed they want which keeps the egg yolks nicely yellow. If I were starting completely from scratch the setup would look different, but as I had leftovers from the previous two flocks that I did not want to throw away I incorporated what I could of it into the new arrangement.

The yard itself measures twenty six feet long by twenty feet wide. The fence is two inch welded wire (an old roll I had in the shop) five feet high. You can't really see it in the pictures, but I used plastic coated two inch welded wire at the bottom where I trenched out the entire fenceline a foot and a half deep then ran the wire through with the bottom splayed outward from the fence. When predators dig they always start right at the bottom of the fence so if they try to dig in now they run into the buried wire which will force them to move further back and dig a much larger, deeper hole to get in. To date none have attempted such an excavation. I've found a few places where something tried to dig in, but they stopped when they hit the buried wire. There is a row of concrete block buried under the gate and the roosthouse itself is sitting on a block foundation which its own wire buried around the outside.

Over the top is my raptor protection system. It is basically just that center post as you see it with a steel stake secured to it. Using seventeen and fourteen gauge electric fence wire I would start at one point of the fence, run to the center post, wrap once around it at the top to keep the wire from slipping then down to the opposite point of the fence on the other sidew where I'd pull it tight and tie it off to the fence. Then I'd move 12 to 14 inches down and do it again until I had gone completely around the yard. It's been six months now and nothing larger than a cardinal has flown down through the wire. A hawk or owl could certainly dive through the gaps to kill a chickento, but they wouldn't be able to fly out again as they'd need to be flapping their wings to generate lift and the wire is too close together for their wing spans. So far I'm pretty happy with it.

I made the photos not long after I put the birds in so the nest boxes hadn't been put in yet nor had I built and installed the feed storage shelter which also contains the electric fence charger and its battery. Completely around the outside top of the fence I have run a hot wire to keep coons from climbing in over the top of the fence. So far it has worked just as I had intended. I need to reinstall the hot wire though as it drains the charger battery faster than I believe it should because I have it running too close to the grounded wire which sets up induction losses.

The roost house itself is left over from the two previous flocks. It was originally supposed to be a portable house, but I built it too heavy so it never really worked as I had intended. This time around I laid solid concrete block down for a foundation then set the house on top of them. I then trenched out the perimeter of the foundation and buried two foot poultry wire to discourage anything from trying to dig under and it has worked so far as I had intended. I removed the rear wall and replaced it with a pair of doors that open up more widely so that I can get into fork out the old litter for the garden and replace it with fresh.

The little mulberry tree inside the yard has more than tripled in size since that photo was taken. A constant diet of chicken manure seems to agree with it. {laughing}.

The birds that you can see in the yard are the original flock that I brooded in February - ten Plymouth Barred Rocks, five Rhode Island Reds, five Buff Orpingtons, five Black Australorps, and the two Easter Eggers. One of those turned out to be snow white so you can see her easily. The other is colored a Buff Orpington gold over white and they are named respectively Snowball and Marshmallow, the last being the color of a perfectly roasted marshmallow. Snowball turned out to lay an aquamarine colored egg while Marshmallow lays a light olive tinted egg (when she lays). All the rest lay varying shades of medium to light brown with one unknown hen laying a cream colored egg.

Four of those ten Barred Rocks I gave to our friends Bob & Susan who are keeping them in a portable hen house he built for the purpose. I lost one Barred Rock to reasons unknown, just found her dead in the yard one day with no apparent signs of injury. So I now have five of each of the dual-purpose breeds.

Of course in the way these things often seem to work my original plan went out the window as not terribly long after I moved the original flock into the big house I bought six Silkie chicks from a local breeder. These are an exotic bantam breed that look very different from an ordinary chicken. Unfortunately, because they are small and very gentle birds they are veritable predator magnets so I have lost four of the six much to my disappointment. Except for the one Barred Rock hen the Silkies have been my only bird losses which is too bad as they grow on you after a while.

I don't have any good photos of mine at the moment to show but I did find some photos on the net of other birds of the same breed. The first one is from Feathersite of a Blue Silkie rooster much like the one I have.
The second one is a Partridge Silkie hen also from Feathersite that is close in appearance to the Partridge hen that I have. I originally purchased them because they have a reputation as being excellent broodies and mothers so I thought I'd give them a go.


My departure from my plan did not stop there though. After the Silkies were old enough to leave the brooder I then picked up thirteen straight-run Cuckoo Maran chicks. Although they look very nearly exactly like Plymouth Barred Rocks they are a French breed that has very little of the same ancestry as the Barred Rock.

The easiest way to tell the two breed apart is that Barred Rocks have yellow legs while pure-bred Marans will have white legs. The barring on the Marans is also not as sharply defined as Barred Rocks have, but you pretty much have to have a bird of each breed standing side-by-side to really see that.

What makes them interesting is that well-bred Marans lay a dark colored egg very nearly the shade of milk chocolate as can be seen in this photo also from Feathersite.


Of course shell color has nothing to do with either the taste or nutrition of an egg, but many folks are intrigued by the dark brown hue. Seeing as how many of the main brown egg laying breeds have been laying progressively lighter and lighter shades of brown I thought it would be good to put a little darkness back into the shell color. The pullets haven't started laying yet so I don't know how dark their shell color is going to be, but they shouldn't be much longer. The cockerels (seven pullets, six cockerels) will grace the Dun Hagan table as the stars of another famous French creation - coq au vin.

This last photo is a partial line up of the original flock about a week or so after I moved them to the roosthouse. The back of the roosthouse faces north and is where the highest roosts are located. Chickens naturally prefer to roost high so you can find them there every night looking out the window. You can also get a fair idea of where a given birds is located in the flock pecking order by which roost pole they are located on. The top of the pecking order is on the highest pole, the lesser birds on the lower poles.
I'll try to get some photos taken these next few days to show what the Dun Hagan poultry operation looks like at the moment now in November.

.....Alan.

A Bit of Photographic Gardening History

It has been so long since we last sent out a family e-mail newsletter that a lot of what we've been up to since then has sort of slipped on by. I won't force you all to wade through all of that but I did come across some random photos yesterday that I thought you might like to see.

This first one is of me spreading horse manure on the Spring 2005 garden. A friend of Diana's owned a horse at the time which she kept in a rather small paddock. This naturally led to a problem of manure disposal which turned out to be a boon for me as she was only too glad to give me all that I wanted! That particular load I was spreading on the as yet unplanted half of my corn patch. In the background you can see the other half of the patch that had already come up. Unfortunately I lost the new planting - twice - to squirrel depradations. About two months later I lost much of the first planting when a downburst from a thunderstorm flattened it. Gardening can be a hard road to travel sometimes.

In the foreground you can see the ends of several rows of beans. Hadn't put much mulch down just then, but did over the next several weeks.

This photo is from April of this year (2006) and shows the Spring garden not long after I had planted it. On the far right you can see a bit of the onions and garlic. In the center you can see the bell peppers, tomatoes, and Swiss chard that I started from seed in the hoophouse. In the past I have always been content to buy my bedding plants, but this last winter I resolved I would start all of my own so that I could get the varieties that I really wanted rather than having to settle for whatever the stores had to offer. I seeded four varieties of tomatoes, two of sweet bell peppers, eggplant, and two varieties of Swiss chard. On the leftmost side are two cayenne peppers at the end of the Swiss chard row and a half row of some pimento peppers and two MexiBell bell peppers. Those were purchased starts. When it came time to plant the seed I realized I'd forgotten to buy pimento seed and I could not find any locally so I bought those already started. The MexiBells are bell peppers with just a slight zing to them, mostly intended for fajitas, and I wanted to see what they were like. The cayennes were last minute purchases.

I decided last year that for once I was going to have all of my trellising and supports in place before I really needed them rather than my usual system of trying to get things tied up after they had already grown large. I used steel T-stakes and livestock panels for the tomatoes. For the peppers I used wire baskets. I would have made those, but they were so cheap at the store I could not have bought the wire for what they sold for. They all worked OK. I even had everything mulched in on time for once. That makes a big difference in how much irrigation is needed and how well things are going to grow once the weather turns hot.

The tomatoes burned up about mid-July as they do every year. The Swiss chard gave it up not long after. Even with the mulch and water by the time it started hitting 94-95 every day they'd had enough. The peppers and eggplant soldiered on regardless and since I'd put wire baskets around them when they were small I suffered less loss from limb breakage. They still broke a lot of limbs but not as bad as usual. It's one of the most annoying things about growing peppers in fact, particularly the pimentoes, which will break if you give them a harsh look.

Here is a better photo of allium rows:
They were planted in the Fall of 2004 in early November. The middle row that you can see already pulled are the Granex (Vidalia) onions. I was very happy with those as most of them were large enough to make good burger/onion ring onions. In fact, they were the best onions I've ever grown.

The row to the right are the generic yellow onions I bought from the farm supply. The eventually grew into big, pretty looking plants, but they ended up looking more like leeks than onions as none of them made a real bulb. I later discovered that most of the generic onion sets sold here in the South are actually long-day onions that won't bulb up properly in the Deep South and do much better north of the Mason-Dixon line. I wish I'd known this years ago as I'd have been able to grow much better onions. Now I am sure only to buy the Granex types.

The row on the left is a mixed stand. The blossoming onions in the foreground are from a pack of starts labeled "old fashioned multipler onions" that I bought at a local market. I let them blossom when I shouldn't have as I think that hurt the bulb size considerably. Unfortunately they did not make it across the summer so I could not plant them again.

The middle of that row are the red shallots that I acquired from several different sources. They grew very well, made big plants, did not blossom, but also did not bulb up. I'm not sure I handled them properly that last month so I'll probably try them again in the future. The far end of the row where you can see the plants starting to yellow is the elephant garlic. About a week after I took the photo I pulled them as well. I let everything cure on the ground in the garden for a few days then moved it all to the carport where it would get afternoon sun but no rain to finish curing. Actually I left them out there about a week longer than I had intended, but maybe that contributed to their longer shelf life?

In the far background you can the sweet potato patch after I fenced it in.

This photo is from June of 2005. The tomatoes and other cool weather plantings were beginning to wind down, but the hot weather lovers like peppers and eggplant were just starting to hit their stride. Those are the Ichiban variety of eggplant and they are very decorative in the appearance of the plant and the fruit. Underneath the eggplant you can see some of the Roma tomatos peeking out. I have learned to pick them when they are about three quarters red and let them finish the last little bit in the house as I lose fewer fruit that way. I also discovered that gopher tortoises really like ripe tomatoes.

These last several photos are some of the daylillies in the driveway flower bed. Not the best shots, but I'm still getting the hang of these digital cameras. And finally, a shot of one of the nasturtiums that I started along with the vegetables in the hoophouse last winter. I had intended to put them in hanging baskets, but they ended up in regular pots instead. I pruned them all back about July or so and they are still blossoming today.

We have some other fairly decent photos as well, but I can't find them at the moment. They're probably still on the old computer so I'll see if I can produce them over the next week or so.

.....Alan.

The State of the Garden

It's November now so much of the place is in the wind down to a long (?) winter's nap as the deciduous plants finish dropping their leaves preparatory to going into dormancy. The orchard citrus won't really go dormant, but they hopefully won't be actively growing either so they will be at least a little more frost resistant than normal.

The vegetable garden on the other hand is in its seasonal transition. We had a very early cold snap a couple of weeks ago that dropped our night time low to thirty four which is mighty close to frost! I thought we had escaped unscathed until several days later I realized that about half of the sweet potato vines were turning black so it seems we did get the slightest touch of frost. I'll be digging them up this weekend, I hope. This year I'm not expecting much of a harvest seeing as how I had to replant three times for the rabbits eating everything. I finally had to fence the area to keep them out, but it was pretty hot by then so I expect the tater harvest to be modest.

The early cold snap didn't take the peppers in the garden though. When I forked out the roosthouse the other day to spread on the area that I was going to plant the onions and garlic in I also threw some of it around them as well. Between the fertilizer and extra water they've perked up considerably and are now full of fruit. This weekend I'll pick the ripe ones to chop up for the freezer. We typically receive our first frost sometime around the first of December so I expect to pick quite a few sweet peppers for the freezer before they finally check out. I only planted two hot pepper plants last spring and they are now the size of bushel baskets and could not be any more full of ripe cayennes. I'll dry some of those and the rest I think I'll try my hand at making hot sauce.

I had not planned on putting in much of a fall/winter garden, but as usual what I planned and what I actually did were not precisely the same. Still, I did keep it smaller than usual. About ten days ago I planted several rows of elephant garlic, several more rows of Granex (Vidalia) onions, and some yellow potato and bunching onions as an experiment.

Elephant garlic is not really a true garlic, but is more closely related to leeks. It does have a mild garlic aroma though which is pretty good in many foods. It makes very large bulbs compared to ordinary garlics. Some of the cloves I planted were nearly the size of golf balls. I grew an experimental partial row last year using a couple of store-bought heads and they did very well. It's a little slow to come up, but once it did it grew well. The biggest thing I needed to know about it though was how well it would keep over a Florida summer once it was harvested and cured. Being a winter crop here it has to keep over the summer for us the way they need to keep over the winter in the northern states. I kept it in a basket in the workshop the whole summer and when it came time to plant I was delighted to find that it was still intact and looking good with no rot at all. That decided it for me so this year I put in three rows. About half of it was the stuff that I had harvested from the previous winter garden and the remaining half was given to me by friends in Arkansas and Oklahoma.

Last year's onion plantings were experimental as well. I put in a row of Granex onions and a row of generic yellow onions from the farm supply. Both grew well. The Granex (Vidalias) made excellent large size bulbs and the regular yellow onions made huge plants but never bulbed up at all. I've since learned that quite a lot of the generic onion sets (yellow, red, white) sold in Florida are actually long-day onions which won't bulb worth a darn this far south. The Granex on the other hand were developed for the South so did well. Of course the down side to them is that they typically don't keep very well, a couple of months at the most. I am delighted to say though that this turned out not to be fully the case. I stored them in the workshop the same way I did the elephant garlic and while I lost maybe a third of them to rot the remainder kept just fine and we still have a half-dozen left waiting to be eaten in November! If I have the same sort of luck with them that I had with last year's I'll braid them this time around. I think some of what I lost over the summer was from being in too close contact with other bulbs that rotted. Braiding them should make it easier to spot the rotted bulbs and remove them before they can spoil their neighbors. With last-year's success in mind I planted three rows of Granex onions and they have been coming up through the mulch for days now.

I've also put in a half-row of some bunching onions that a friend in Oklahoma gave me and another half row of yellow potato onions. Those last I ordered from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange and they may be iffy for Florida so I'll just have to see how they turn out. I'm interested in them because they are a bunching onion so reproduce themselves without the necessity of making seed and they make bulbs two to three inches in diameter that supposedly store well. I tried shallots last year and they made large plants, but they never bulbed out very much. I'm not sure I handled them right that last month or thereabouts so I'll probably try them again in the future. I'm trying to find something that will serve as onions that I can reproduce here every year so that I won't have to keep buying them.

Last weekend I finally got the greens planted out. Another row of Purple Top turnips, Florida Broadleaf mustard, a row of American Purple Top rutabagas and a row of Danvers 126 carrots. The turnips and mustard did well for me last year while the rutabagas and carrots are experimental. I've never grown Swedes before, but seeing as how they are essentially just very large turnips I expect they might do OK. If I get good roots we might try waxing some the way they are done for the commercial market. I've had waxed rutabagas keep for several months in the refrigerator.

I've never had much luck with carrots in the past, but this last winter a friend of mine in Marianna (in the Panhandle) grew a very nice crop of carrots so I decided to try them again. Danvers 126 is what he grew so I looked around until I found that type of seed and sowed them as well. The rutabagas, turnips, and mustards all began breaking ground last night but the carrots haven't put in an appearance yet. I'm sure I'll see them too in another couple of days. It has been a dry year here so I've had to irrigate the garden a good bit. As soon as the latest seeds are up and growing well I'll be able to back off on the water a bit once I can snug the mulch up in the rows.

That's the state of the Dun Hagan gardens at the moment.

More to follow as it happens.

.....Alan.