Garden happenings...

A warm day today, though that's predicted to change early this week, with temperatures dipping back into the upper thirties. I spent a couple of hours cleaning up the garden, trying to get things back into shape after the path and patio work. I noticed that my carambola and limão 'Cravo' had finally sprouted, and brought them outside to soak up the rays.

My friend Bill picked up me up an 'Owari' satsuma grafted onto Flying Dragon rootstock. I have a couple of other trees on Dragon: A 'Hamlin' orange (our 'native' DeLand orange) and a 'Honeybell' tangerine. The Dragon rootstock is dwarfing, keeping trees to below ten feet -- though from what I've read, the final verdict isn't in on their ultimate size. Bill has a grapefruit that's already at least nine feet in three years. In any case, the rootstock inarguable brings the trees into production earlier -- Bill's trees produced abundantly this year. My two trees went in the ground only last year, so I haven't had any fruits.

At Lowes, I picked up a Sanbokan Lemon (Citrus sulcata) in a gallon pot for ten bucks... I think I'll grow it in a container, at least for this season. I swear, that's the last citrus I buy.

Let's see... In the veg beds: I'm really frustrated with my collards this season. I bought some plants at Lowes and I guess they must have been bum: Planted right next to Rappini, and while the Rappini has grown well, the collards are still tiny. The first salad greens of the season (planted the third week of September, so four months ago) are about to go to seed (which I'll collect). I have a bunch of 'Red Sails' just now coming into harvest size. To ensure salad until mid-May, I planted more 'Summer Glory' lettuce mix (Parks) last week, so when the Sails come down, there will be more rabbit food to replace it. Strawberries have finally started to produce well -- both patches yield a big handful a day. 'Purple Cherokee' tomatoes are just about ripe. 'Little Fingers' eggplant is recovering well from the freeze. Carrots need to be pulled, and 'Sea Foam' chard is ready to pick again.

Finally, I got in the mail earlier this week two figs that were recommended to me on the Fig Forum at GardenWeb: 'LSU Purple' and 'Celeste.' I got them at Johnson Nursery. They were smallish, maybe thirty inches (pruned) and the trunks were chopstick thick. No complaints, since they were only ten bucks each. Right now, they're sharing a large (thirty-gallon) pot. That brings to five my fig varieties: 'Alma,' 'Brown Turkey' and 'Kadota.' Because of their susceptibility to nematodes, the only fig in the ground is 'Alma.' If it grows without much problem, I'll transfer the others into the ground, too.

Walk Score - How walkable is your house?

Walk Score - How walkable is your house?:

"Walk Score helps people find walkable places to live. Walk Score calculates the walkability of an address by locating nearby stores, restaurants, schools, parks, etc."

An interesting site. We're in "downtown" DeLand, right across from Stetson University. We scored 60 out of 100 -- neither here nor there. Many of the entries are inaccurate (like listing a Japanese restaurant as a clothing store...), but all tools have their inadequacies, and results are only as good as data.

Subjectively, I'd rate our neighborhood as quite walkable, particularly for Florida, or generally the southeast. Many students here do without cars, and I've had short-term colleagues live here without a car.

What's your score, Floridians?

Our house...

Our neighbor's mother, Linda, surprised us with this Christmas card, her excellent water-color painting of our beloved pink house. We live on Amelia Avenue in DeLand, FLA. Our street, which cuts through downtown DeLand, is named after Amelia DeLand Leete, Henry DeLand's sister and wife of the town's first minister, the Rev. M.S. Leete.

From the 1880s until the 1920s, our neighborhood was the center of DeLand's groves. In the early 1920s, the neighborhood was developed as a very upscale "subdivision" (long before there was something to subdivide here in Central Florida). There are about a dozen large homes that date from the 1920s in a five-block area. Ours is one of a half-dozen Spanish Revival houses built in town, all of them dating from the boom-time of the 1920s. Several Tudor-style homes, built by the same architects, somewhat incongruously share the neighborhood with some neoclassicals. The story I've heard, though never confirmed, was that there was a contest among seven architects to design their perfect Florida house, which explains the variety of styles and rather extravagant sizes. (For the time, this house was huge even without the additions: It's initial square footage was roughly 1200 square feet, built at a time when the average house was not much larger than today's garages... We forget often that as recently as 1950, the average US house size was under 1000 square feet.)

The 1920s was a heady time of economic expansion and easy credit (for the well-to-do classes, at least), and it left its mark in the eclectic pastiche of architectural styles here in DeLand. The 'Roaring Twenties' were followed, of course, by the Depression and World War II. In the intervening decades, the lots were divided and smaller, more modest cinderblock homes have been built, and Stetson has expanded from its original core of buildings to cover something like seven-hundred acres (about a square mile).

DeLand's groves are long gone.

An update: I had a colleague over for supper last week who told me a bit more about the history of our house. John came to Stetson back in 1955. He's in his eighties, and though he's physically frail, his memory hasn't failed in the slightest. He told me that this house was the first one he looked at when he joined the faculty at Stetson. At the time, it was roughly half the current square footage. (There have been three additions made to the house: one in the 1960s, the others in the 1990s.) He said three sisters lived here, and they were auctioning the house off in November. John and another new faculty member, James Stewart (the Dean of the Chapel), were inspecting the house. At the time, the house was heated by porcelain-framed electric wire grates -- not unlike the resistance wires in a toaster. (The grates are still in the walls, and some of them still work, though we have a central system now. We've hidden them behind furniture to keep kids' curious fingers out of trouble.)

Anyway, it was cold outside, but very warm inside, and John and Jim went out to check the electricity meter to see how much energy was being used. John said the dial was spinning so fast you could hardly see it!

Jim was worried that the auction was going to shortchange the sisters, and went inside to offer them $14,000 for the house. They demurred, sure that the auction would bring a fair price. The next day, the opening bid was for $7500. Jim won the auction and bought the house for $10,500. John said Jim even offered to pay the sisters the full $14,000 he had initially offered, but they refused his generosity.

James lived here for ten years. He died not so long ago, at the ripe age of 102.