January at Dun Hagan

It's mid-January now and still we have not had a real frost yet. This is unprecedented in the twenty years I've lived in the Gainesville area though it has probably happened more than once in the past.



The day before New Years I noticed the Meyer lemon in the orchard was full of blossom buds and on New Years day they began to open. They've been blossoming ever since as you can see from the two photos I took this evening.







Fortunately, none of the other orchard citrus are showing any inclination to blossoming or put out new flushes of leaves just yet.









Unfortunately the lemon wasn't the only thing blossoming when I went out to take the photo this evening. Two of my pear trees in the pasture have begun to blossom as well.

This particular tree seems to be an Asian pear or a hybrid of one as the fruit are apple shaped, somewhat russeted, and very good eating out of hand. Fireblight took all the fruit these last two years but if a freeze doesn't get the blossoms this year I'm hoping we'll get lucky this time around.

The pasture trees came with the place when we bought it so I don't know what variety any of them are other than they are all different from one another. I haven't yet done my winter pruning so I'll try to get that behind me this weekend as well. In addition to pruning out unwanted limbs I'll need to prune out some unwanted parasitic plant growth too as you can see.



It's mistletoe for you folks who may not recognize it. The seeds it makes are sticky and attractive to some birds which is how it is spread. I have to cut it out of one thing or another most every year.








My major project for this weekend will be the vegetable garden. About four nights ago I found a pig standing out there eyeing the turnips so the fence suddenly jumped to the top of the priority list! It's the third time I've had a pig come onto the place, all of them apparently someone's escaped domestics so sooner or later one of them is going to wreak havoc. The row of flags are my post markers and the posts on the ground are to be the corner posts. I've marked off an 80ft x 80ft plot which will give me about 6400 sq ft of garden area. I probably won't ever have it all under cultivation at one time, but will plant one area per season and fallow the rest. I'll have the corn patch in there as well. The fence will be two-inch welded wire four feet high with some poultry netting or something similar around the bottom to keep the bunnies out. I may even go so far as to run a hot wire to keep the squirrels and coons out too.

Between the warm weather allowing the bugs to fluorish and the hens getting into the garden twice the mustards and rutabagas are pretty well a write-off this time around. The carrots are a maybe, I may yet get a few worthwhile roots. The turnips have been growing vigorously enough to stay ahead of the bugs and birds. As you can see even though it's now mid-January the peppers are still healthy, growing, and full of green and red fruit that I need to harvest and process for the freezer. The elephant garlic is doing well, the Granex onions are looking so-so, but I'll put some fertilizer to them once I get their patch weeded out.

If you click on the garden photo to get the larger version you'll see the sprinkler is running. It's not serving as irrigation this time, but rather as a chicken chaser! When I let the birds out in the evenings Cogburn the Rooster will lead the flock straight to the garden every time to dine on my greens (they love mustards) but they don't love them so much they'll suffer a cold shower to get them! {laughing}

Speaking of Cogburn here's a photo of him and his flock having a hen party in the front yard. That's not all of them, but it was all that I could get into one photo. The coon attack of the other night left us with just two of the Cuckoon Maran cocks which are now serving as backups for Cogburn. They look so much alike that I haven't named them other than to call them collectively Noodles, their one-day fate.

If I am home I like to let the flock out the last hour of the day or so to forage up their own greenfeed and whatever bugs they can find. The rest of the time they're in the henyard which you can see here: I've never posted a photo of the yard since the birds began laying to show what the set up looks like now. It may be January, but that white stuff on the ground is most definitely not snow! It's actually shredded office paper that I bring home from work for use as poultry litter. It works OK but doesn't last very long before it rots away. I'm thinking of trying peanut hulls next. The two tipi shaped structures are feeder shelters to keep the rain out. The long structure backed up against the inside of the fence is the big nest box and the small one is next to it on the other side so that you can't see it from this angle. I plan on replacing the big nest box as it's never worked as well as I'd hoped it would and is a real chore to move. I'll build two more small boxes like the one I already have and that should do the job.

The structure backed up against the outside of the fence next to the gate is the feed shelter that I keep the current-use feed in as well as the fence charger and its battery. The hens are out foraging in the yard, orchard, and pasture. They go to roost on their own so just before good dark all I have to do is close the gate.

I hope to spend this weekend building the garden fence so maybe I'll have a photo of the work in progress come Sunday or Monday. Saturday morning I'll be going to a scrap yard in Ocala to see if I can find some expanded metal mesh. I have an idea for a chicken tractor that will let the birds be on the grass without the need to run a hot wire around the outside or wire all the way across the bottom. It may not work like I hope so it's an experiment, but I'm pretty sure it should perform as I expect. If it does I'll post some photos.

I took the afternoon off of work today to make a run down to Orlando to Tropical Plant Products. So far as I've been able to find they are the nearest source of coconut husk chips which I use for the container citrus and soon will use for all other large container plants as well. They're not open on the weekends thus my weekday afternoon trip. The husk chips have several seemingly contradictory qualities that make them very attractive for potting up container trees. They hold water very well, but they also allow for a good deal of air penetration so that plant roots do not easily smother and die from overwatering. In fact my experience with them so far has been that so long as the bottom holes of the container are open you can't overwater the things. The chips seem rather expensive for the apparent size of the bale, but they are highly compressed. Once you soak them they swell like sponges and you end up with quite a bit of material to work with. This time around I also bought several cubic feet of coir which is shredded ground coconut husk fiber to use in place of the peat moss that I had been mixing with the chips. It has much better rot resistance than peat so I'm hoping a pure coconut husk chip and coir potting media will allow me to only have to repot the trees every three or four years. Don't know if that will really work or not, but I aim to find out.

That's it until the next time.

.....Alan.