Winter at Dun Hagan

So, here it is February and the novelty of cold weather has long since worn off. I've lost track of how many frosts we've had so far. No record breaking low temperatures though we did get one night of twenty one that hammered my grove citrus and may get another one come this Wednesday. February ranks right up there with August as my least favorite months of the year.

Nevertheless life goes on so we go with it. Not everything is dead or dormant.

This is a Pink Perfection camellia (C. japonica)I planted a few weeks ago after making the poor thing suffer in a pot for a year before deciding where I wanted it. It was horribly rootbound of course, but seems to be overcoming it. The blossom isn't fully open yet.

And this one is a Little Man camellia (also C. japonica) that I planted just this weekend. The blossom appears white in the sunlight, but is actually the palest of pinks.

The roses are slowly growing out there as well, but at the moment do not have any open blossoms. I'm hoping to have a nice Mutablis photo soon.

Winter in Florida can be a busy time in the vegetable garden if you want it to be. It's always been traditional to have a "greens garden" of turnips, mustards, and collards, but there is much more we can grow than those three standbys. This year I have succession planted three varieties of ordinary green cabbage, one of savoy, and a red variety. Joining them are broccoli, Brussels sprouts, pac choi, and Chinese cabbage. In the non-greens I've planted a couple hundred onions along with turnips, carrots, and sugar snap peas. Red skinned potatoes will soon be joining them. Not everything has been a success, but many of them have done well.

This is my paper mache garden. The white mulch you see is shredded office paper. In the walkways between the rows there is cardboard underneath the shredded stuff. Admittedly it's not very pretty, but it works well and most importantly it's FREE. I don't have to pay for it or rake it up. I wouldn't use it around my ornamentals unless I could hide it under a more visually appealing mulch, but the vegetable garden is on the backside of the property where it doesn't have to please anyone but me.

The row on the center right I have just planted red and green cabbage, broccoli, and collards. Towards the back just to the right of them is the pac choi and to the right of it is the carrots. That row came in very sparse for being hit with a frost just as they broke ground but what there is are growing well. To the right of them are the Brussels sprouts and it looks like this year I might actually get something to harvest. I plant them to keep me humble because I've yet to actually make them produce for me. Hope springs eternal though so I keep trying.

The row to the center left has the last couple of heads of cabbage from the first planting towards the back. In the front is the savoy cabbage I planted a month or so ago and the row to the left of them has the rest of them as well as some more broccoli and collards. They need fertilizing as they're starting to lag. Hopefully I'll be able to get to that this weekend.

This is the first planting of broccoli. It's all been cut now and is steadily producing side shoots. I haven't kept up with them as often as I should so a few in the front are starting to bolt (blossoming).

The onion patch. These are granex (Vidalia) onions that bulb well here in the Deep South. Big, sweet tasting onions. The twenty one degree freeze of the other day yellowed them out, but they've been coming back nicely. The two rows to the right were planted from sets back in November and some of them are already the size of tennis balls. The row to the left were from plants about a month later so aren't as big yet, but they're working on it. The paper mulch keeps the soil moisture even and slows down nutrient leaching so I can usually get very good growth. Elephant garlic has also done well for me in the past and keeps even better. I was tight for space so I didn't plant any this time.

In the greenhouse things are perking right along. In fact it's beginning to get rather crowded in there (big surprise!). Between the warmth, nutrients, and lengthening days the blossoms are really starting to pop.

A Key lime blossom surrounded by new leaves. No leaf miners this time of year.

Another Key lime. This one has mature leaves that you can still see some residue of sooty mold on from before I sprayed them. As the new growth emerges the citrus aphids grow with it so need a bit of control once in a while. Tis a pity I can't buy just a half handful of ladybugs...

This is a Buddha Hand citron. It's among the more persnickety of the citrus that I grow so it's only been recently that I've learned how to make it happy which shows in the new leaves and heavy blossoming it's doing. I'm hoping this time it will hold onto at least a few fruit.


This is a mature Buddha Hand fruit from Wikipedia. They don't really have any practical value beyond making candied peel or zest, but they're so odd looking that they make great curiosities. In some Asian nations they are used as room fresheners as they are highly fragrant.

Blossoms on a Eureka lemon. When I went to repot this one last winter I did not have the size container under the bench that I thought I did so ended up having to use one larger than I really wanted. This subsequently caused problems with drainage, root rot, and leaf loss over the course of the summer. Last September I finally realized my error and moved it into a more appropriate size of pot and it responded by beginning to grow again. Since moving it into the greenhouse it has put out copious new leaves and blossoms. As the new foliage comes up to size it drops older damaged leaves such as the ones you can see with leaf miner tracks in the background.

Another Eureka lemon. We've taken to calling this one "the little tree that could" because it doesn't seem to matter how much the leaf miners and grasshoppers harass the thing it always matures a large crop of lemons. As you can see from the bronzy looking leaves in the foreground it's putting out a lot of new growth as well. I'm hoping they'll all go into spring with a healthy crop of mature leaves before the first leaf miners show up. I could eliminate them, but it would require the use of systemic pesticides that I'm not keen on using so have to tolerate their damage.

I'm not completely focused on citrus. There are a few other things out there that divert me from time to time such as this pink geranium. Looks nice against the tomato foliage doesn't it? The poor thing needs a good pruning from having been squashed flat last summer when another plant fell on it, but it's been blooming so heavily I can't bring myself to chop it up!

Now my grandmother actually gave that pink geranium to the Kinder Major several years ago. One of several flowers at the time. But what I think is that it was really a clever plot to draw her daddy into flower gardening because she knew who it was that was going to have to do the looking after it! And it may be working too because a couple of months ago when I was at the Home Depot looking for something else I came across this peppermint geranium. I ended up buying the thing even though it was looking rather poorly because the blossoms really caught my eye. It turns out that it was badly overpotted and suffering from soggy roots. I moved it into smaller quarters and it has responded well. It stands out nicely against the parsley background.

The nut crop in some parts of the country last fall was nearly non-existent which has left the local squirrel populations in desperate straits to keep from starving so they are eating all sorts of things they normally wouldn't touch. One such was my grandmother's potted hibiscus that she overwinters on her back porch every year. When we were up to the farm for Christmas they had gotten onto the porch to eat every bud, leaf, and twig tip from her plants. So I thought I'd post one of mine so she wouldn't forget what they looked like while hers are recovering. ;)

Winter drags on. We've got another hard freeze predicted for the next three nights and I've still to do a lot of my winter chores of pruning and spraying and chainsaw work. Even if nothing is growing outside there's no end of work waiting to be done.

Y'all stay warm now.

.....Alan.