Where have I been?

Hello! Good to see you again!

Even though it has been a year since I last updated this blog I still receive the occasional e-mail about it so my nagging feeling of guilt over having abandoned the thing has finally motivated me to start posting again.

2008 proved to be an eventful year so catching up will take some time to cover the ground, but if you’re interested here it is.

In January of last year we were expecting a hard freeze down to fourteen degrees (f) the day after I made my last post, the coldest we would have seen in many years since at least the Christmas Eve storm of 1989. Fortunately it didn’t really go that low but the twenty two degrees we did get was bad enough for my unprotected citrus out in the grove.

I was puzzled by the damage seeing as how everything out there is supposedly cold hardy until it occurred to me it had been reaching nearly eighty degrees every day for the week prior so the trees had not hardened off as they should have. No fruit out there this year, but I didn’t lose the trees outright so they spent the year growing back what froze off. I bought frost cloth for this year so will hopefully not repeat last year’s mistakes.

As annoying as the losses in the grove were the situation in the greenhouse was much better.

Those fat Eureka lemons made some fine lemonade. The blossoms that you see are now the fruit for the lemonade we're enjoying right now. The leaf miners and grasshoppers did their best, but the tree shrugged them off to do its duty. We’ve taken to calling it “the little tree that could.”

Keeping it company was this Key lime with blossoms, green and mature fruit. Those blossoms are now a colander full of fruit on my kitchen counter. Limemade, meat marinade, or just squeezed into a glass of selzter water it's all good. Add a little rum for a great end-of-the-week treat!

Here is the brother of the first Eureka lemon. I had a bit of trouble with this one last year as I had repotted it into an overly large container which subsequently gave me drainage and root problems. I realized my error in September so moved it into a more appropriate size pot. It responded by putting on a new flush of leaves and seems to be recovering well now.

This is one of two Tahiti (Persian or Bearss) limes, both of which have produced nice crops this year. Had a bit of scale problems over the summer that I treated with horticultural oil and copper in the hopes that I won’t have to go to anything stronger. So far, so good. It's much easier to deal with pests like those before moving them under cover than trying to eradicate them once they are inside.

Winter is also the time to gear up for the year’s new birds and this year was no exception. My 2008 order from Privett Hatchery arrived on February first.

This year's list was:

4 Easter Eggers (lays green/blue eggs)

8 Production Reds

6 Barred Rocks

1 Barred Rock cockerel

10 White Leghorns

6 Black Australorps

3 Jersey Black Giants

6 New Hampshire Reds

8 Red Sex Links

1 Red Sex Link cockerel

3 Speckled Sussex

The Black Australorps and four of the Leghorns were for others. The Jersey Giants and Speckled Sussex are for pretty with the rest being working birds.

Unfortunately my good mail order bird karma ran out on me with this batch as they had a rough trip via the Postal Service which translated to the worst brooder losses I’ve ever had. I ended up losing most of the Easter Eggers, several of the Leghorns, and one or two from the rest were lost. Still managed to deliver the birds I’d promised other folks and the remaining ones were enough to meet our needs. I really hate losing chicks like that, but it’s going to happen once in a while.

Here’s a photo of the little ones freshly installed in their new home. A couple of months prior to their arrival I painted the brooder box and hover so that I could eliminate the plastic sheeting, but I think I’ll go back to it this next time. Much easier to keep things clean that way. The paint does improve the lighting inside the box though. The frame with the hardware cloth on it in the foreground is where the waterers and feeders go once the birds have recovered from their trip and can be out from under the hover. This helps to cut down on wet bedding which is a sin where brooding chicks is concerned as it encourages coccidiosis which is a common killer of poultry chicks.

Here’s a close up of the fuzzballs. For the first couple of days I like to feed them out of an egg carton because it allows them to get into the food without being able to scratch it out and waste it. Once they’re eating well I transition them over to reel-top feeders then eventually to tube feeders. I have never found a system that is really efficient at keeping chicks from wasting feed, but one can reduce it to a tolerable amount. When the chicks finally go out on pasture the brooder bedding with its attendant manure and spilled feed goes into the garden. What you see in there now grew a fine crop of sweet potatoes that I dug up the first week of November.

Shortly after the chicks came in we went down to St. Petersburg to visit with Diana’s grandparents who do the snowbird migration every year. One of the payoffs of slogging through Tampa/St. Pete traffic is stopping by Jene’s Tropicals. They’re a great source of tropical and subtropical plants, especially fruit. I picked up a Williams Seedless tangerine (a Murcott selection) that I may keep as a container plant. It’s a late season fruit so would be vulnerable to the hard freezes we often receive in January.

While there I made a wholly unexpected score of perennial peanuts!

I've been wanting some for years, but had not been able to find any in small quantities. For those of us who live south of central Georgia they are an alternative to alfalfa which does not generally grow well here. The University of Florida has done a lot of work with them developing four or five varieties for ground cover, forage, and hay uses. Once home I divided the six pots of plants into forty two to grow out over the rest of the winter. I planted the first plots over the summer. It can take several years to get a good stand from the initial planting so this will take some time but I'm excited to give it a try because it is very nearly the only practical summer legume I can grow here in my soil type and it's a perennial to boot. This allowed me to start a project that will hopefully lead to us being able to produce more of our own animal feed.

Of course with all those new birds I had to build more housing to keep them. I don’t have any photos yet of the Mk. III chicken tractor. It looks pretty much the same as the earlier iterations but for using 4x4s for the sledge runners rather than 2x4s of the previous models. This brings my chicken tractor fleet up to three and I have plans for at least three more. I’m going to have to have at least one more before I can take the 2009 birds out of the brooder and the Kinder Major will need one for her 4H birds when we find them.

Spring eventually rolled around, a trifle late, but it did finally get here. Unfortunately my spring garden was later still so that I actually got it into the ground in the first week of May! I figured I’d need all the help I could get so I enlisted some fertility magic by going to see the Kinder Major do the Maypole Dance at the local ladies club.

The Kinder Major is the blonde in the blue vest.

Just in case that wasn’t enough I enlisted the Kinder Minor’s aid as well.

Losing a months worth of growing season cost me in production, but we were still able to make out OK. We brought in enough summer squash (2 varieties) and zucchini (just one type) to keep us in fresh produce and filled a couple of half gallon jars with dried product before powdery mildew finally killed the plants as it does every year.

The rest of the garden was a mixed bag. The sweet potatoes and okra did well.

The five varieties of sweet and hot peppers on the other hand turned out to be a loss. This surprised me as I have always found peppers one of the easiest things to grow but every one of them did poorly. For a while I thought they’d contracted a virus until I read in a gardening forum about a new introduced pest afflicting us here in Florida - the Chili Thrip. The adult pest is less than two millimeters in length and likes to hide on the undersides of leaves so can be tough to spot - especially if your eyes aren’t as good as they once were like mine. Well, live and learn. Next time I’ll be looking for them and know how to handle them.

Also in May I planted the citrus trees I had bought in January. The Flame grapefruit, Sunburst tangerine (again!), Ambersweet orange (again!), and a Kimbrough Satsuma. At the same time I planted the Mutablis, Bowbells, and Madame Joseph Schwartz cracker roses I bought from a vendor at the Dudley Farm when they were doing their cane grinding and syrup making in December. The Madame Schwarz did not make it through the summer, but the others took and are now patiently waiting on me to get out there and give the rose bed the attention it needs. I haven’t planted them out yet, but I also have four little rosemary plants for that bed as well. My plan is to put a rosemary between every rose so that I get both a pleasing scent and beauty at the same time. We use a fair amount of the herb in the kitchen as well.

June came around at its appointed time bringing with it our rainy season. We caught our first big thunderstorm on a 20% rain chance to get three inches of rain in less than an hour! Just for dramatic effect it also threw in copious lightning, high winds, and hail, but other than a bit of erosion in the driveway we suffered no damage. The chicken tractors rode it out well though I did realize I needed to put rain caps on the feeders for those times when the rain comes down sideways. Haven’t had any problems with wet feed since.

The new birds we received in February started laying about then so our egg production ramped up. Lost several roosters in a brief period of time to what I think was coyotes - Fred the Barred Rock, Noodles the Rhode Island Red along with Ping & Pong the Red Sex Links - which annoyed me no end as I really wanted them for breeding. The predators always seem to take the ones I want most to keep first. In the plus column though it turned out that one of the three Black Jersey Giant pullets was a cockerel. He fooled me for a while as there were two other cockerels in that particular tractor with him so he never crowed and wasn’t showing any obvious signs of not being a pullet. Like all young males coming into their own though once his brothers had gotten their transfer orders to the Bachelor Pad he had to crow about having it made. I named him Black Jack then moved him in with the other boys. Predator losses have now left me with just five roosters.

Later that month I picked up a Kaffir lime on a trip to Lowes out of their ten dollar citrus area. I try to give that area a quick once over when ever I’m there just to see if they have anything unusual. Most of the time they don’t but every once in a while they’ll surprise me. I expect the lime will mostly serve as a curiosity like the Buddha Hand citron I picked up the same way. But I might decide to try some southeast Asian cooking sometime so will have an important ingredient fresh to hand if I do.

In July the Kinder Major spent a couple of weeks at a 4H summer camp held at the county extension office where among other accomplishments she earned her Hunter Safety Certification. As we were dropping her off one day I noticed there was a different type of perennial peanut planted in the flower bed in front of the building than what I already had. It turns out they were taking some of the plantings out to use the area for other purposes so the secretary told me I could have all I wanted to dig up! Like all good gardeners I keep a shovel in the car for just-in-case so I did. I’ve been propagating it since then and hope to have enough to put at least one planting in the pasture in the spring of next year. I don’t know the name of this variety either as the extension agent told me it had been there for at least twenty years and no one could remember what it was called. It’s one of the taller forage/hay types rather than the ground cover kind that I’d bought the previous winter. Things are looking up on the homestead feed production front!

August rolled around in its usual hot and humid way so the fruit began to ripen. We made a fair crop of grapes this year though we only harvested about half of them. Tropical Storm Fay never amounted to much in the way of wind (for which we are thankful) as she passed us by about fifty miles to the north, but she did drop twelve solid inches of rain. I picked all of the grapes and pears that were ready before she arrived for just-in-case which was a good thing because when she’d gone the remaining grapes were on the ground and ruined. We put up nearly fifty pints of pear sauce and about thirty or so half-pints of pear-butter. The grapes are still in the freezer waiting on me to turn them into jam. No fruit from the orchard citrus this year thanks to the freeze in January except for one solitary Meyer lemon.

Over the summer I experimented with using paper mulch in the vegetable garden. It’s not pretty to be sure, but it works rather well. After planting out the sweet potatoes I laid paper feed sacks between the rows then covered them with shredded paper which I also put between the plants. Except for a few places where I put it down too thinly it held up all summer long suppressing weeds, slowing nutrient leaching, and limiting water loss. I liked the way it worked well enough to do the entire winter garden the same way. It looks like a paper mache’ project run amok, but it’s working.

Also in August we advanced our homestead security by bringing home a pair of Great Pyrenees puppies. Our next door neighbor has kept Pyrenees for years to guard his goats and birds and I’ve wanted pups from those dogs ever since I first saw them. He showed up unexpectedly one day to tell us that he had a litter ready to sell so ready-or-not we bought two males. I let the girls choose their names and seeing as how we’d just finished reading The Lord of the Rings I suppose it should come as no surprise that they chose Merry & Pippin.

It’s been an educational experience for the dogs, myself, and the girls since we brought them home! (laughing}. Here’s a shot of the K. Major taking them for a walk, or them taking her for one, it wasn’t clear which. It was starting to get dark so they are in their night vision mode. The next day they drug her through a patch of stinging nettles!

We’ve been working with them around the chickens since bringing them home so they are well used to being close to birds. Being pups they still want to chase once in a while, but a firm “NO!!!” is all it takes to make them stop. As pups will do they’ve been growing rapidly and are now in the 60-65 pound range.

Merry is the one on the left. He’s slightly larger than his brother now, his badger markings are slowly fading away and he carries his tail curled upwards more often. He’s more aloof than Pippin who likes to stay near when we’re out for a walk. You can’t see it in this shot, but Pippin has a dark ring around his tail and his puppy markings are still fairly dark though they too will eventually fade to the usual Pyrenees all-over white.

We bought sturdy collars but when we went to pick them up I quickly discovered that even on the first hole the collars were much too big for either of them so had to punch more on the spot to make them fit. That was then. Three weeks ago I had to let them out to their last hole so they wouldn’t be too tight. In another month or so I may have to go buy new ones! They get a good grade of large breed puppy food with a couple of eggs apiece every day which obviously agrees with them. In fact if I don’t mix their eggs in they’ll sulk and won’t eat. Spoiled rotten, but they’re a part of our family now.

As a part of training the dogs to the birds I moved the Bachelor Pad from its place under the trees off the end of the garden to the end of the new dog pen that I put up next to the workshop. Jacques le Coq, Picky, Fred the Second, and Black Jack didn’t seem to mind once they realized the dogs couldn’t get into their side. After a few days they all pretty well ignored each other. Once in a while Jacques will get into a spat with the other boys and fly the fence over into the dog pen. He’ll spend the day there scratching around where the dogs pay him no mind. Come dark he flies back to his side to go to roost. I did once remove the dividing panel between the two which is the only time I ever had trouble as the dogs suddenly showing up on their side of the fence caused the roosters to panic which in turn caused excitement among the dogs who then wanted to chase. I put the panel back and they all calmed down. Out in the pasture where there’s lots of space they don’t act that way so I think it was the confinement that was causing the problem.

On another trip to Lowes I picked up a small Temple orange which I’ll also keep as a container planting to extend the season. The citrus collection is steadily growing! For my family members who read this - stop smirking! It’s cheap and it keeps me out of bars doesn’t it? {laughing}

With the arrival of September it was time to start thinking of the cool season garden. We don’t normally see much of a break in the weather before mid-October but the ground needs prepping while the weather is still hot. This time I wanted to use the north end of the garden which is within the fenced area, but had not really been planted before. A little time with the hundred yard measuring tape and some flagging pins had it laid out so that I could start penciling in what was going to go where. To my surprise the last week of September proved to be unusually cool so I consulted my gardening books about cool weather crops which said that carrots and turnips can be planted in September so I did. Alas, the next week proved to be quite seasonal so those two rows were not successful. The carrots faded out completely and the turnips were spotty, but enough of them made it through that I left them and we are eating the roots now. Diana and I are delighted with them, but the Kinder are appalled. {insert kid making yuck face here}

As it became available I laid out more feed sacks, cardboard, and shredded paper mulching between the rows. An area feed store proved to have granex (Vidalia type) onion sets so I bought enough for a couple of rows. At the same time I put in a couple of rows of hot and sweet peppers, tomatoes, cabbage, broccoli, and Brussels sprouts. We got a nice rain from Hurricane Ike as he toured the central Gulf on his way to Texas, but other than giving us some much needed precipitation presented us with no problems.

Also during September I got the 2009 chick order off to Sand Hill Preservation Center. They had a special going that if you got your 2009 order in before the end of November you could get their 2008 prices. We ordered Buff Orpington, Black Jersey Giant, and Delaware chickens along with Midget White and Wishard Bronze turkeys. We’ve kept Buffs and Jersey Giants for years, but this will be our first experience with the Delawares. I haven’t kept turkeys since I was a boy so we’re really looking forward to getting them. I’m hoping the K. Major will take an interest in maybe showing them for 4H. We’ll have plenty of time to get ready for the new birds as the order isn’t scheduled to arrive before May, possibly as late as June, depending on how their hatching goes. I might even have a chicken tractor or two built by then!

October was more or less seasonal, a little cooler than usual in the first half, but not greatly so. The last few days of that month though proved a surprise when we got our first frost of the year! The night of the 29^th/30^th we broke a fifty year record when the mercury sank to 30 degrees which we do not normally see around here until a few days either side of December 1^st and I was not ready. The sweet potatoes hadn’t been dug yet, the peppers were full of fruit, and I had only just started buying the material for this year’s greenhouse rebuild, never mind having it finished! I spent an evening carting all of the container plants into the workshop then covering the peppers and tomatoes with cardboard boxes. The potatoes were nipped but I was planning on digging them up that coming weekend anyway which I did.

It was a fair harvest, but would have been a good bit more had I not lost so many roots to something eating them. Mice or voles I suppose. Next year I’ll dig them at the beginning of October to see if I can forestall some of that. Until now I’ve always dug them the first week of November, but if we’re going to get early freezes I’ll have to dig earlier.

I played the “cover before frost” with the peppers several more times after that before finally giving up. They were green healthy plants, but they hadn’t grown an inch since that first frost. By the time December rolled around I wrote them off. Such is gardening. The next frost did them in and I replaced them with a mix of cabbage, collards, Chinese cabbage, broccoli, and pac choi. It’s all doing well so far though the grasshoppers seem to really like Chinese cabbage. You’d think with the five frosts we’ve had so far the grasshoppers wouldn’t be a problem, but if we get one good day of warm weather they’re out again. During this same time I also bought some onion plants from another farm supply and set them out. I misjudged how many were in a bundle so bought twice what I thought I was getting so that I now have two double rows and one triple row of them. If they make at all we’re going to be set for onions all year!

My other “must get done before frost” project every fall is getting the greenhouse ready to move the container plants in. Much of my container citrus are cold sensitive so won’t survive our North Florida winters the way they would further south. I had a problem though in that my collection of potted plants had grown rather a lot since last winter so there was no way I was going to be able to get them all into the 8ft x 10ft house I built last year. A rebuild was necessary and I was doing just that when our unseasonally early frost turned up the urgency. This year’s greenhouse measures 12ft x 20ft which is more than enough to hold the collection while leaving some room for seed starting. I’ll talk more about the construction in a separate post. So far it has passed a 28 degree night with flying colors so we’ll see how it goes when we get our coldest nights in late January and February. For next year I’ve decided to buy one of those clear solar pool covers for insulation in the hopes of cutting down heating costs.

So that brings us up to now. It’s been a long, busy year that I wish could have been busier still, but family and employment simply will have their share of our time so we gardeners have to do the best we can. We’ll eat the first head of broccoli from the garden tonight. We’ve been eating turnips for weeks. The first planting of cabbage is about ready to cut and the first onions are beginning to swell nicely. I’ve got second and third plantings of most of those out there to get us to the warm season when we’ll start the gardening cycle all over again.

I can’t promise how often I’ll update this blog, but I will endeavor to get at least a couple of posts a month in. See you the next time!

…..Alan.