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.