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.