Furlongs per fortnight.

There are times it seems that in spite of ones best efforts the entire world conspires to exasperate any forward movement. Thus it has been lately. Oh, they were all needful and necessary things that got in the way, but what I really wanted to be doing was getting the garden in order and getting some stuff that has been impatiently waiting in their pots into the ground. Progress lately would seem best measured in furlongs per fortnight.

It was a weekend day and I didn't have to ride herd on a two-year old nor go and do anything for anyone else (at least until late afternoon) so I finally planted the Louis Phillippe rose that the father of a friend of my wife's gave to the Kinder Major and the Caldwell Pink (I think that's right) that I bought December before last at the Dudley Farm Days here and here from a vendor. Also planted a blue plumbago that I overlooked putting into the greenhouse so it froze. I'm told it'll grow back from the roots so I'm hoping they didn't freeze too much. Also got in two rabbiteye blueberries. One of them has the curious name of "Savory" which strikes me as an odd name for a sweet fruit. The other is a mystery that I found growing in between my already established plants. I don't know if it's a root sucker or a seedling, but I gave it a space like all the others.

I fertilized all of the container plants in the hoop house and picked a few lemons and limes to go with supper and to give to my brother's family who came to have supper with us tonight.

No pictures today. The Kinder Major has put our camera in a safe place for us and like safe places are often wont to do it cannot be found.

.....Alan.

Home is where the hearth is.

It's been kinda chilly around these parts lately. Chilly for Florida anyway. Yesterday we hit 22deg F which we haven't seen around here for several years. My foolish pomegranate tree that had partially leafed out already was thoroughly zapped for its trouble as well about about two thirds of the citrus trees in the orchard. So far it just looks like some minor leaf loss, but it's too soon to say for sure. The heater in the hoophouse worked fine so the cold sensitive stuff inside passed the night untroubled.

Being a Florida boy I don't much cotton to being cold so this last week or so I've been getting stuff done inside the house. I did manage to finish the garden fence though.
I haven't been able to find a vantage point yet that allows me to encompass the entire garden in one shot so I cut off the same corner as I did in the first photo. I still need to trench around the bottom of the fence but it's pretty well pig proof as it is. And a good thing too as the latest porcine marauder was in my pasture again tonight. He's rather unusually marked as my experiences with pigs go with a gimpy left front leg. Still seems to get around OK just the same as he was able to make good time when I ran him off.

I stretched the fence wire last Saturday, most of it anyway. The wife needed to go into her office so I knocked off in the mid-afternoon to watch the baby while she was gone. It had been chilly and breezy all day so I didn't regret the lost work time too terribly much. I was pretty tired by then as well so naturally I developed a yen to do some baking! For a time there I had been making all of the bread the family ate, but gradually it became a time issue and I stopped. When the weather turns cold though something good hot from the oven is mighty attractive so I made three loaves of the Dun Hagan standard whole-wheat bread.

The loaves could have been shaped better, but for not having made bread in a year I was generally satisfied. They tasted just as they should and all three loaves were soon gone.

Like eating potato chips those first three loaves only made me want to make still more so several days later I made some cinnamon-raisin bread. Those really didn't last long and by Friday we were pretty well out of bread again. Diana had an overnight Girl Scout camping training thing this weekend and the Kinder Major had one of her friends over so Saturday I spent riding herd on three girl children and baking up a storm. No pictures here I'm afraid as Diana had taken the camera with her, but I made three more loaves of whole-wheat bread then three loaves of cinnamon/raisin/butter roasted pecan bread. Used some of the whole-wheat for making French toast for breakfast this morning which the kids went to town on.

Being modern twenty first century homesteaders we use electrical appliances like most everyone else does. A Bosch mixer kneads the dough for me and we have an impact type grain mill to convert wheat berries into flour. Twenty cups of flour takes about thirty minutes or so which is everything from measuring out the wheat to milling to cleaning the equipment and putting it away. Once in a while I do a loaf or two by hand to keep the feel for the thing, but even with the power equipment it's hard to find time to bake when it needs to be done.

There's just something about coming into a warm house redolent with the smell of rising dough and baking bread that really communicates that you're home. I recommend it to everyone.

.....Alan.

The Hydrologic Cycle

Dun Hagan is on the Florida Sand Ridge which is an ancient dune line dating from the Pleistocene era I believe. Many thousands of years ago the sea level was much higher than it is now so if I were living back then the homesite would probably have a wonderful ocean view.

Change is constant though and the centuries passed by as the frozen areas of the Earth gradually took up more and more water so that the levels of the worlds oceans fell and the coast line gradually wandered farther and farther away. Today it is about twenty five miles more or less as the crow flies to reach the Gulf.

But the dunes of that ancient shoreline still remain and have made for one of Florida's more unusual environments. There are no native rocks on the property. I'm sure there are some, but I'd probably have to dig thirty or forty feet to find them and likely would find heavy clay first. Above that it is sand and sandy loam all the way to the surface. As you might expect water drains away fast so that we never have a mud problem. This also means that surface water comes and goes according to the rainfall cycle of the time. If the area is low enough it may keep open water right on, but for the most part on the Sand Ridge you can't really count on having a pond from year to year.

Back in 2001 when I was doing the research prior to the purchase of Dun Hagan I availed myself of the new aerial and satellite photography web sites such as Terra Server that had recently come online to find as many photos of the place over the years as I could. Depending on the year the area behind the house just across the fence line was either dry prairie, a small to decent sized pond, or an arm of a much larger lake. A study in the drought cycle of North Florida.

But 2001 was several years into a drought cycle so when we closed on the place there was nothing out there but dry prairie with a couple of spots where the plant growth was more lush than the surrounding area, but certainly no open water. The maps, particularly the one hundred year flood plain maps we had to have as a part of the purchase, showed a pond, but there was nothing there. That's the way it stayed until the 2004 hurricane season rolled around and Florida found itself on a tropical weather roller coaster the likes of which we had never experienced before when for the first time since record keeping began we suffered the landfall of five named tropical cyclones. Bonnie gave us only a smattering of light rain as she was mostly a problem for the Panhandle. Charley had been predicted to hit us square on with 90mph winds, but he made his famous last minute jog to the east and did his best to blow away Punta Gorda and Arcadia. Missed us clean though without even a thunderstorm to show for it. Ivan gave us a bad time as we were in the cone for him for quite a while. Indeed the Friday before he made landfall he was projected to come ashore just twenty five miles away. But he too deviated from the script as hurricanes are often wont to do blowing northward to tear up the Panhandle again.

Frances and Jeanne though hit us square on. We were fortunate they came ashore first on the Atlantic side so that we only caught them after they'd been ashore for more than a hundred miles and the winds were much less. Jeanne still managed to blow the canopy of the big red oak on top of the house though which had me on the roof at the height of the storm with a chainsaw clearing it away and covering the damaged areas with a tarp.

It wasn't all bad news however because after Frances had passed we found ourselves with a pond where there had once only been dry prairie. Wasn't a lot of pond, but considering that we'd never seen water there before we were impressed. Then Jeanne came through and filled the pond still more so that we had a respectable body of water. We were very pleased to see it. Oh, for a few days we were fighting an onslaught of mosquitoes but about a week after they came the reproductive cycle of the local frog population caught up and we soon had literally tens of thousands of little green rain frogs everywhere. I've been in Florida all of my life and have never seen so many frogs in so small an area. The mosquito problem quickly disappeared. Gradually the predators that eat frogs caught up with the population boom and their numbers dwindled down to more normal levels.

The pond lasted for about two years. In the winter time I'd flush ducks off the water when I'd go outside at dawn to feed the chickens. We saw water birds of every species that calls North Florida home. I once saw a hawk take a coot right on the water. Had I not just happened to be looking in the right spot at the right instant I'd have missed the whole thing it happened so fast. The hawk hit the coot and flew off into a nearby oak tree to eat it. The coot never even flapped having been killed instantly.

But change is constant and 2006 proved to be a dry year as El Nino blew away our hurricane season and with it a good deal of our annual rainfall so the pond gradually dwindled until it finally disappeared altogether about six months ago or so. Back to dry prairie once more. At the end the wading birds cleaned up the trapped and dying amphibians that could not get away and the small population of minnows that had begun to flourish for a time.

Then came the February first winter storm rolling up out of the Gulf on its way to the northeast. We were fortunate that the big winds passed to the south of us. The folks in Lady Lake, Deland, and New Smyrna were not so that the last I heard the death toll was up to nineteen from the F3 (at present) tornado that went through Lady Lake and the other twisters that hit in other areas. What we did get out of it all was more than six inches of rain in one night. The next morning when I went out to feed the hens there was that shine on the ground across the fenceline that we'd come to miss. The pond was back!

It's not much of a pond, but I am impressed what one winter storm was able to do. The pond at present is about as full as it was when hurricane Frances first filled it back in 2004. We'll have to see what the 2007 rainfall cycle brings us to know whether it will once again disappear into the ground, remain the same, or even grow. 2006 was a dry year, I'm ready for a wetter one. How about you?

.....Alan.

We're OK.

I've received several e-mails about us after last night's storm so I want to let everyone know we're OK. The big winds and the tornadoes were to the south of us where they scared some of my family down there but no one injured and no property damage that I am aware of.

We received better than six inches of rain in the night. The pond behind the house which has been dry for months now has water in it again to the level it had when hurricane Frances first filled it back in '04. All of the litter in the henyard washed away so the pasture downhill from the birds will likely be greener this year than usual.

Other than that we took no damage. I saw water standing this morning in places I haven't seen it stand since the '04 hurricanes.

I'll try to get a picture of the pond up this weekend.

.....Alan.