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.

2008 Southeastern Citrus Exposition - Part One

2008 was much too full to get it all into one post so I've decided to do a couple more looking back over the year.

In early November I drove up to the University of Georgia Coastal Plains Experiment Station in Tifton to attend the Southeastern Citrus Exposition. It's an annual event held in various states and attended by citrus enthusiasts from all over the country. This time it was close enough that I could day trip the thing so off I went.

I left the house at five a.m. driving through on and off rain all the way up and one truly torrential downpour between Gainesville and Alachua to arrive at the confence center at 8:00 a.m. when the registration opened. When I got there the plant sale in the parking lot had already started.


Naturally being a citrus exposition there was a lot of it on offer but there were also many other plants as well such cycads, palms, deciduous trees and a nice selection of camellias.

I got close to them just long enough to snap that shot then kept my distance before I lost all reason and started buying as I really like camellias.

After nearly spending myself broke I finally made my way inside to register and settle in for a long day of all things citrus.

There were some good speakers. Monte Nesbit from the Auburn University, Gulf Coast Research Station in Fairhope, AL. spoke about their continuing efforts to bring back the commercial satsuma industry in southern Alabama and the rest of the upper Gulf Coast. Before commercial citrus became as big as it is today in penninsular Florida there used to be quite a few satsuma groves across the upper Gulf Coast. They're more cold hardy than most sweet oranges and need cooler fall temperatures to develop their best flavor.

Dr. Wayne Dixon with the USDA spoke about the citrus greening disease problem that has broken out in Florida, Brazil and now possibly California. This is a potentially devastating disease that first renders the fruit inedible then ultimately kills the tree. If we cannot come up with a successful management plan it has the potential to eliminate citrus as a commercial crop in Florida. Unfortunately the disease is spread by a small insect called the Asian Citrus Psyllid. It looks like a small moth and has proven to be easily transported by both man and weather so that now it has been found in nearly every Florida county, Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, and Southern California (by way of Mexico they think). Complicating matters further is that the disease can remain latent up to four years before the first visible symptoms in the tree occurs which in practical effect means that if the psyillid has been found in a given area it's very likely the disease is there by now as well, but not yet visible.

There doesn't seem to be any way to stop the spread of the insect and eradication of the disease is impossible so management is the only alternative. The only upside of all of this is that there is now a twenty million dollar research effort underway here in Florida to come up with that management plan. There are experiments using salicylate compounds to treat the disease, but they're still too preliminary to know if they're going to amount to anything. And there are some indications that some types of guava may deter psyllids from trees they are interplanted with, but those experiments are still in early days as well. I'm personally going with the plan to keep on keeping on with what I'm doing until they come up with some sort of management or defense or until the disease kills all of my trees and I have to move on to other types of fruit. The situation may look bad, but we're not dead yet.

After Dr. Dixon we heard from Jerry Selph, retired from the Helena Chemical Company down to Indian River county in Central Florida on identifying and managing common citrus pests and diseases. Some very good photos and management advice. For a chemical company man he was not really big on the use of pesticides, recommending using them only to the extent that was necessary to bring an out of control problem back to where naturally occuring predators could deal with them. Over spraying was he said one of the best ways of turning a difficult management problem into an impossible one when the naturally occurring predatory insects had been killed off.

The last speaker was Dr. Jack Hearn, Retired USDA Citrus Scientist. For anyone interested in ag history he was one of the most interesting speakers of the morning and I wish there had been more time to hear him talk.

When the speakers were finished it was time for the fruit contest awards and the raffle drawing. This is my one halfway-decent photo from inside the auditorium as the awards were being given.

That citrus fruit shirt he's wearing really stands out doesn't it? The plants on the stage are for the raffle and the bit of the palm you can see him standing in front of was the first item drawn won by yours truly - a European Fan Palm. It was somewhat like carrying a porcupine getting it into and out of the truck. I still haven't decided where I'm going to plant the thing, but I'm sure something will come to me presently. The bad thing about it is that it's gotten me interested in palms now as if I needed yet another type of plant interest...

Once the awards and the raffle were over it was time for lunch which gave me a chance to pick Monte Nesbitt's brain more about his work with satsumas in Alabama and the various cold resistance strategies they've employed. I have a terrible memory for names so I can't recall everyone that I spoke with that day, but there were a lot of them! There was an amazing amount of knowledge walking around the place.

Lunch finished it was time for the walking tours. The first was with Dr. Wayne Hanna. He's the turf and forage grass specialist at Tifton, but he's taken an interest in cold hardy citrus and is trying to develop seedless varieties that can be grown in South Georgia. Here's a photo of us all out in the field near to the conference center where he's telling us about his experiments with Changsha tangerine and Ichang lemon. The conference center is the large building in the far background.


Behind him are his trees. The Changsha row on the left, the Ichang on the right.

He says the lemons have only just begun to bear so I was only able to find one fruit in a position that I could get a photo.


It's too soon to say if they are going to pan out, but it looks promising so far.

The Changsha he is further along with. As you can see the trees are loaded with fruit.


The lighting is a bit weird because the sky was starting to lighten a bit and I wasn't able to improve it more than that in the editing.

Here's a close up of the fruit on the branches:

They had nice color and most of them had good external qualities.

But what he's working on is seedlessness so it's the inside that tells the story. Here are several of the fruit that he cut for us.


As you can see most of them have a fair amount of seeds, but you'll note the one fruit in the lower left is seedless. Here's a close up for a better view.


He's still working on identifying the specific branches of specific trees in the row that are producing the seedless fruit and whether they'll continue to do it year after year, but it looks promising so far.

Of course no seeds is only part of the story. The fruit has to taste good as well and Dr. Hanna graciously allowed me to sample some of the seedless one that he cut when the presentation was over. It was surprisingly good. A decent Page or Ponkan would still be better in my opinion, but had I paid money for a sack of those Changshas at a fruit stand I'd have been pleased with what I got. If he's providing any cold protection for those trees I must have missed it. I can say they are all out in the open just several hundred yards from the conference center. If ever he is able to develop one that he's satisfied to release I'll be in the line to get one.

The second walking tour was Dr. Ruter's ornamentals work at the plots on the other side of the Interstate. The only photos I took of that area were the oil camellias he's working with. The species name is Camillia oleifera and they look much like any other camellia in the appearance of the plant itself. The flowers are mostly single though he had some nice doubles as well. What makes them of particular interest are the rather large seeds they produce. The pod with the seeds inside is about the size of a ping-pong ball and they have a high extractable oil content. Given that the plant is a long lasting perennial there is potential for development of an edible oil source similar to olive oil in chemical composition and with a higher smoke point. He's still fairly early into his project but I think it shows some promise.

The 2009 Exposition is scheduled to be held November 21st in Charleston, South Carolina at Magnolia Plantation. I don't have any further information yet, but when it becomes available it should be posted on the Southeastern Palm Society website who sponsor the exposition every year. I'll try to remember to post it here as well.

In the next post will be the photos from the fruit judging competition. If you have any interest in citrus you want to see them!

.....Alan.

The Payoff

It's been a long summer, but fall is finally on the far horizon. I note the five day forecast is predicting highs only in the eighties which is hopefully the beginning of a seasonal trend.

If it's too hot to want to work outside there's always something to do inside. Such as making the family jam supply for the year. So far there is muscadine grape, strawberry, and peach jams and maybe some persimmon to come if the recipe I came across the other day pans out. I messed up the shots of the jars so I'll try to reshoot them this coming weekend for the next post.

This is the last batch of peach jam processing. The nice 16qt Tramontina pot that Diana got me for Christmas last year (only cost $200 for a $40 pot! {laughing}) works well as a water bath canner. The Key limes are off of our trees. I always end up having to buy some additional fruit but those limes were grown by us. I much prefer fresh squeezed juice to bottled lemon juice which doesn't have a very good flavor to me.

This is a bit of summer's bounty from earlier in the season - yellow summer squash relish. We have a particular fondness for this relish, in fact there's nothing I like more on a burger or dog so we always make a lot to get us through the year and some for gifts. Had to go and buy a couple of red sweet peppers this time around as I didn't have any ready when I wanted to make the relish. Usually except for the vinegar, sugar, and spices we produce everything else. This is a great way to use all those squash that have grown too large but that aren't yet woody.

Just now it's the persimmons that are coming ripe. We inherited a mature tree when we bought the place. I have no idea of its specific variety but it is a Hachaiya type astringent that tends to alternate bearing. This is one of its big crop years and it is heavy with fruit. Ordinarily I just run them through the Victorio and freeze the pulp but this year I'm woefully short on freezer space so I'm determined to dry or can as much as I am able.

The problem is that astringent type persimmons have a peculiar chemistry. Even when allowed to become soft-ripe which makes them sweet and non-astringent extended cooking can cause the pulp to revert back to mouth puckering. I have a recipe that claims to eliminate that but I haven't tried it yet. This coming weekend I hope.


What I've been doing lately is drying them. This is a photo of the first batch. They were pretty in the dryer but the finished product was disappointing. I've since learned to wait until they are fully colored but still firm (and thus astringent) then peel them, cut into rounds, then dry. The dehydration process takes the pucker out and the cross sections reveal a pretty eight petaled design that looks nice when finished. Dried persimmons are new to me so I'm still experimenting with what I'll do with them.

I will be devoting a little freezer space for some puree though. The stuff is great in pancakes, muffins, and mixed with some cornmeal and buttermilk for a baked pudding.

The citrus are starting to color up. My trees are all young so this will be the first year that we've gotten more than a couple of fruit. Still won't be buckets full but hopefully we at least have some for fresh eating for a while.

I picked up the winter forage seed last weekend. Looks like I'll have to get out and start getting the ground prepped soon. The garden has been patiently waiting as well.

Looking forward to cooler weather!

.....Alan.

Ready To Launch

Spring is busting out all over at Dun Hagan these last couple of weeks. Everything on the place that can is growing. I'm going to have a busy weekend getting the fertilizing, watering, and last minute pruning done. The daylillies aren't waiting for me, they're already getting down to work. Two of the three bare root pecan trees I planted several weeks ago have broken bud and are beginning to leaf out. I'm hoping the third will soon as well.

I spent much of this week getting ready for the arrival of our newest batch of chicks. Rebuilding the brooder hover, cleaning up the brooder box, filling it with bedding, cleaning the waterers and the feeders. The hover still is not really the way I want it. The parts that I bought to do the improvements with turned out to be the wrong size and by the time I discovered the error I didn't have time to go get the correct ones so I settled for replacing some of the wood and the one bulb socket that had gone bad. Maybe I'll get the rest finished after the current batch of chicks are outside.

The birds in the established flock originated from Ideal out of Texas. The new chicks are from Privett Hatchery located in New Mexico. They have a good reputation for the type of utility breeds I favor. Between the two flocks I should now have a good genetic base to work with. Not all of the birds in this batch are for me though, eight of the thirty six chicks are for the father of a friend of mine who wants to start keeping hens himself. Between the two of us we ordered Americaunas, Rhode Island Reds, Production Reds, Plymouth Barred Rocks, White Leghorns, Black Sex Links, and New Hampshire Reds so we have quite a variety as you can see from the two photos. I was only able to catch a few of them with the camera though, most of them wouldn't come out from under the hover.

There's a really nice website by the name of Feather Site where you can see photos of what each breed looks like both as chicks and as grown birds. Very handy when you're trying to tell one chick from another.

The established flock has gotten that good Spring energy as well with every hen and her sister laying for all they're worth. The refrigerator is full of eggs and I've taken to giving free samples in an effort to drum up new customers which I'll need come August when the new birds begin to lay.

Now that the chicks are in the brooder I can give some attention to other matters, notably fertilizing everything that needs it and maybe playing chicken with the late frosts by planting the garden a week early.

The bedding plants are ready and waiting. Mostly peppers with a few tomatos and eggplants and the marigolds as you can see. Florida Cracker relates that he plants cosmos in his garden as well as marigolds and I think I may give them a try myself. I've done nasturtiums several times before which did OK until about late July or so if I kept them well mulched and watered. I'll be visiting family the weekend of April first which is when I'd ordinarily be planting the frost tender stuff in the garden so I'm debating with myself about whether to take the chance of planting this weekend and gaining two weeks growth or playing it safe by waiting until the seventh. Come Sunday I'll study the long-range forecast and come to a decision.

The container plants in the greenhouse don't care about late frosts. The weather is warm, the days are growing longer and they are getting down to business. The lemon trees are full of blossoms, green fruit, and the last few ripe fruit that we haven't used yet.

I have two of these Eureka lemons (the common grocery store lemon), the other is blossoming too, but I haven't repotted it yet. That's on my to-do-soon list along with the Buddha's Hand citron that I bought the other day. It's dangerous to walk through a nice selection of plants on a nice spring day. Very dangerous.

I'm sorry about the photos being a bit fuzzy. For some reason the camera and I could not get it together no matter what I did.

The Key Limes are not about to be shown up by a mere lemon. They're all full of blossoms and new growth coming on too. There's a bunch of green fruit in there as well as some remaining ripening fruit that we'll soon pick and use.

You can't see them very clearly for being the same color as the leaves but behind the Key Lime is a Tahiti Lime (the big grocery store lime) that has green fruit and blossoms of its own. The geranium is one that my grandmother gave to the Kinder Major year before last. She has a nice flower collection given to her by my grandmother and aunts all kept that way by her daddy.












Last for this post is mystery for the reader. What is it?

I'll give you a clue. It's a common container plant that is often grown in the ground in frost-free areas.












If I can get something done this weekend maybe I'll get another post up come Sunday or Monday night.

For you folks up there in the Frozen North, we're sending our winter birds back. We've painstakingly tied a bit of spring to each of their legs. Y'all look sharp for them.

.....Alan.

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.

A Bit of Photographic Gardening History

It has been so long since we last sent out a family e-mail newsletter that a lot of what we've been up to since then has sort of slipped on by. I won't force you all to wade through all of that but I did come across some random photos yesterday that I thought you might like to see.

This first one is of me spreading horse manure on the Spring 2005 garden. A friend of Diana's owned a horse at the time which she kept in a rather small paddock. This naturally led to a problem of manure disposal which turned out to be a boon for me as she was only too glad to give me all that I wanted! That particular load I was spreading on the as yet unplanted half of my corn patch. In the background you can see the other half of the patch that had already come up. Unfortunately I lost the new planting - twice - to squirrel depradations. About two months later I lost much of the first planting when a downburst from a thunderstorm flattened it. Gardening can be a hard road to travel sometimes.

In the foreground you can see the ends of several rows of beans. Hadn't put much mulch down just then, but did over the next several weeks.

This photo is from April of this year (2006) and shows the Spring garden not long after I had planted it. On the far right you can see a bit of the onions and garlic. In the center you can see the bell peppers, tomatoes, and Swiss chard that I started from seed in the hoophouse. In the past I have always been content to buy my bedding plants, but this last winter I resolved I would start all of my own so that I could get the varieties that I really wanted rather than having to settle for whatever the stores had to offer. I seeded four varieties of tomatoes, two of sweet bell peppers, eggplant, and two varieties of Swiss chard. On the leftmost side are two cayenne peppers at the end of the Swiss chard row and a half row of some pimento peppers and two MexiBell bell peppers. Those were purchased starts. When it came time to plant the seed I realized I'd forgotten to buy pimento seed and I could not find any locally so I bought those already started. The MexiBells are bell peppers with just a slight zing to them, mostly intended for fajitas, and I wanted to see what they were like. The cayennes were last minute purchases.

I decided last year that for once I was going to have all of my trellising and supports in place before I really needed them rather than my usual system of trying to get things tied up after they had already grown large. I used steel T-stakes and livestock panels for the tomatoes. For the peppers I used wire baskets. I would have made those, but they were so cheap at the store I could not have bought the wire for what they sold for. They all worked OK. I even had everything mulched in on time for once. That makes a big difference in how much irrigation is needed and how well things are going to grow once the weather turns hot.

The tomatoes burned up about mid-July as they do every year. The Swiss chard gave it up not long after. Even with the mulch and water by the time it started hitting 94-95 every day they'd had enough. The peppers and eggplant soldiered on regardless and since I'd put wire baskets around them when they were small I suffered less loss from limb breakage. They still broke a lot of limbs but not as bad as usual. It's one of the most annoying things about growing peppers in fact, particularly the pimentoes, which will break if you give them a harsh look.

Here is a better photo of allium rows:
They were planted in the Fall of 2004 in early November. The middle row that you can see already pulled are the Granex (Vidalia) onions. I was very happy with those as most of them were large enough to make good burger/onion ring onions. In fact, they were the best onions I've ever grown.

The row to the right are the generic yellow onions I bought from the farm supply. The eventually grew into big, pretty looking plants, but they ended up looking more like leeks than onions as none of them made a real bulb. I later discovered that most of the generic onion sets sold here in the South are actually long-day onions that won't bulb up properly in the Deep South and do much better north of the Mason-Dixon line. I wish I'd known this years ago as I'd have been able to grow much better onions. Now I am sure only to buy the Granex types.

The row on the left is a mixed stand. The blossoming onions in the foreground are from a pack of starts labeled "old fashioned multipler onions" that I bought at a local market. I let them blossom when I shouldn't have as I think that hurt the bulb size considerably. Unfortunately they did not make it across the summer so I could not plant them again.

The middle of that row are the red shallots that I acquired from several different sources. They grew very well, made big plants, did not blossom, but also did not bulb up. I'm not sure I handled them properly that last month so I'll probably try them again in the future. The far end of the row where you can see the plants starting to yellow is the elephant garlic. About a week after I took the photo I pulled them as well. I let everything cure on the ground in the garden for a few days then moved it all to the carport where it would get afternoon sun but no rain to finish curing. Actually I left them out there about a week longer than I had intended, but maybe that contributed to their longer shelf life?

In the far background you can the sweet potato patch after I fenced it in.

This photo is from June of 2005. The tomatoes and other cool weather plantings were beginning to wind down, but the hot weather lovers like peppers and eggplant were just starting to hit their stride. Those are the Ichiban variety of eggplant and they are very decorative in the appearance of the plant and the fruit. Underneath the eggplant you can see some of the Roma tomatos peeking out. I have learned to pick them when they are about three quarters red and let them finish the last little bit in the house as I lose fewer fruit that way. I also discovered that gopher tortoises really like ripe tomatoes.

These last several photos are some of the daylillies in the driveway flower bed. Not the best shots, but I'm still getting the hang of these digital cameras. And finally, a shot of one of the nasturtiums that I started along with the vegetables in the hoophouse last winter. I had intended to put them in hanging baskets, but they ended up in regular pots instead. I pruned them all back about July or so and they are still blossoming today.

We have some other fairly decent photos as well, but I can't find them at the moment. They're probably still on the old computer so I'll see if I can produce them over the next week or so.

.....Alan.