Merry Christmas from Dun Hagan

The Hagan family wishes you a Merry Christmas
and the best of gardening New Years. .....Alan, Diana, and the Kinders Major & Minor.

Pilgrimage

Well, Saturday the Kinder Major and I struck out overland on our annual pilgrimage to that mecca of North Florida fruit growers Just Fruits & Exotics near Crawfordville in the Florida Panhandle.


For those of us who live in the Zone of the Damned that comprises North Florida and the southernmost portions of the other Deep South states we are caught between just a little too much cold weather for tropical and most semi-tropical fruits to survive and not quite enough of it for many of the temperate fruits of the more northern states to bear fruit. This means that finding worthy varieties to plant can be a challenge. Fortunately the determined fruit grower is not entirely without resource because there are suppliers such as the Just Fruits folks and others like Peacocks Nursery in Florahome near to Palatka. One has to be a determined fruit grower though because in the usual way of things they are always far away. Crawfordville is a six hour plus round trip from Dun Hagan and this year it was an eight hour plus trip for meeting my cane syrup connection still further west to pick up my year's supply of the Southern delicacy.

Because of the time and distance involved I always buy a lot when I go though this trip was the least I've ever brought home. Too near Christmas for major garden hoggery this year.


Also in the usual way these things work I took a list with me of what I wanted and did in fact buy them - a Sunburst tangerine, Ambersweet orange, Kimbrough satsuma, and Chinotto orange. But they always stock more than they list on their website and just as soon as I walked in I spotted a Eustis limequat that I've wanted for some time that wasn't on their site. This wrecked my fruit budget, but Diana has come to expect that I'm going to spend more than I planned when I go to Crawfordville! The stuff on my list all have a fair degree of cold tolerance so will go into the orchard with the others. The limequat doesn't so will be joining the other container citrus in the greenhouse. This gives me a Lakeland and Eustis limequat so next on my list is to acquire a Tavares which will then give me all three of the Key lime/kumquat hybrids developed by Dr. Swingle long ago. With the two thorny and two thornless Key limes and the Tahiti limes and Eureka lemons we certainly do not lack for acid citrus.

Once we finished our fruit and syrup business I decided I'd better air out the child who had been remarkably patient in her riding so we went down to the old lighthouse at St. Marks. This too is becoming something of a tradition in that I've never taken her there that the weather was good! This time was no different as a cold front was moving in. It drizzled and sprinkled all the way from home to Crawfordville and back. Never really raining hard, just enough to get everything wet and limit the visibility. This gave something of a different atmosphere to our usual sunny Gulf weather as the mist softened the edges and colors of the landscape.

We took her last years Christmas present binoculars with us to take advantage of any bird watching opportunities that might present themselves and as they always do at St. Marks they did.


My little point and shoot camera isn't really suited to such work as bird photography, but I was fairly happy with this one shot of a pair of great white herons.


There was a little blue heron standing next to them but just as I pushed the button he suddenly darted behind the little grass point on the left after a fish.

The fresh water areas looked very low to me so I figure they're suffering with the drought much the same as the rest of the state is.

My other half-way decent bird shot was the pelicans on the old dock pilings near to the light. The mist was so thick that you couldn't see more than a couple of hundred yards on the water. There are several anhingas or cormarants at the bottom of the pilings.


The child had a misadventure with falling in the water so we cut our visit short in favor of returning to the comfort of the truck and its heater.

The ride home was as cloudy, damp, and uneventful as the ride up. We'd left just after dawn and arrived back just at dark. All of the drizzle and mist didn't amount to enough to even register in my gauge.

The show wasn't over though as the Weather Service had been steadily increasing our rain chance while we were gone. By the time I went to bed we were under a tornado watch over a wide area so I left a window in the bedroom half open as I always do when these late night active fronts come in. About two in the morning the sound of heavy rain and wind woke me and for the next two hours or so we had quite a show. A lot of lightning for December, but fortunately very little of it was close. The wind got a little sporty for a time, but never enough to concern me much.

This morning I woke to find this!


That two and three-tenths inches of rain is more than we've had in pretty much the last three months combined which made up for costing me two hours of sleep. We're still pretty deep in the rainfall deficit hole, but this helps. I heard a news story on the radio last week that our projected agricultural losses from the drought here in Florida for the year are going to top a billion dollars so you can bet there a lot of folks giving thanks for what we received.

The weather today was damp, breezy, and just a little on the coolish side but when the sun would peak through the breaking clouds it was pleasant. The winter forage I planted in the corn patch was prime so this morning I did a proper job of stretching the fence dividing the corn patch and the garden then moved in the chicken tractors. As these things are sometimes wont to do this did not go smoothly but I did eventually get them moved in.

The original Mk. I chicken tractor is OK on firm, even sod, but get it into soft dirt and there's going to be problems. I tried retrofitting runners onto it that raised the height of the cross member but achieved no practical difference. The Mk. II version moved much easier though the soft dirt made for slow going there as well. I need to get some grass growth over that portion of the garden which I will attend to this next month or so.

The vegetable garden is coming along nicely. I thinned one row of turnips on Friday and still have another just like it to do and the two rutabaga rows. Also have at least another half-dozen volunteer elephant garlic to transplant. The whole thing needs a thorough weeding which I hope to attend to over the Christmas holiday. The birds in the henyard really get excited when they see me coming with a bucket full of weeds this time of year.

We're predicted to go to 29 tonight I expect we'll get a nice frost out of it. I have come to love this time of year when I can spend the day working hard outside and not break a sweat. Sure is a lot more pleasant than working outside in the summertime!

.....Alan.

Snug in their bed for a long winter's nap.

Well, our last frost caught me by surprise coming as early as it did so I didn't yet have the hoophouse covered. Fortunately my cold sensitive container plants were able to pass the night on the carport no worse for the wear.

Fool me once, but not twice. The Kinder Major and I quickly did the deed with the greenhouse so naturally the weather did not turn cold again. Until this coming Tuesday night when the friendly folks at the National Weather Service predicts a low of 36 (this is two days out) which is not in itself low enough to really injure anything, but chilly enough to bring growth to a halt.

I hate having to work in the dark with plants as thorny as lemons and limes so this afternoon I moved all of my cold sensitive citrus into the hoophouse. When it's partially buttoned up it stays a good bit warmer than the outside air which makes things like limes and lemons happy enough to put out new leaves and blossoms. On the frosty nights I close the house up completely which keeps things in a non-frozen state. If it really drops into Jack Frost country I have a small space heater and fan that keeps things warm. The heater has a thermostat so if the interior temperature begins to rise too high it turns itself off. The fan keeps the warm air from pooling in the top which it is wont to do when there is no air circulation. This keeps the heater in the bottom of the house from having to run as much.

I had hoped to have some genuine UV resistant greenhouse plastic to use this year, but it didn't work out. Once more it is just simply builder's plastic which is good enough to get through a winter and spring, but will finally grow brittle and crumble in the hot Florida summer sun. If I were able to really go whole hog on house covering I'd use two layers of plastic with a layer of bubble wrap in between for insulation which would reduce the amount of power needed. Maybe next year.

We've been enjoying Satsumas for a couple of weeks now from the little tree in the orchard. The Ponkan (Honeybell) tangerines are coloring up nicely. They're actually ripe even though the peel is still half-green. Citrus is funny that way in that the peel color of a fruit can be as green as grass yet the interior can be perfectly ripe. For the orange colored citrus they need exposure to a certain amount of cool temperatures to evolve their sunny color. In the tropical areas they may never change color and once in a while you can find green colored but ripe citrus for sale in the markets. The Seville (sour) oranges are beginning to color up as well. I'm looking forward to this as I want to try my hand at making orange marmalade from our own fruit. The juice is well suited to Florida style barbecue and ade type of drinks as well as that good Cuban mojo marinade.

The vegetable garden is coming along nicely but I didn't take a photo as I'm still weeding the rows out. I made a start this morning, but didn't have time to make a lot of progress so it will have to wait until next weekend.

.....Alan.