Picking the Very Last of the Navel Oranges

This year was an excellent year for citrus.  We've picked every last tangerine off our our trees and just the other day I went out and picked the final bucketful of navel oranges off of the top of the tree. I pick the low hanging fruit first, because it is convenient, but after you've eaten everything else, then I start picking the hard to reach fruit at the top of the tree.

We've eaten plenty of them by just cutting them up and snacking on them.  We've juiced many of them and have enjoyed drinking fresh squeezed orange juice - it is so much better than store-bought OJ.  Tricia has flavored our kombucha with some of the juice and IN THIS POST we show a delicious option for using our oranges. I'm telling you, it is the best cake.

The last oranges at the top of the tree

After I had picked them all, I made another pass around the tree just to make sure that I wasn't leaving any behind.  Lo and behold there was another one hiding behind some leaves in the middle of the tree - can't leave any behind.

Hide & Seek Orange

Navel Oranges get their name from the 'belly-button' looking object on the opposite end than the stem.  THIS LINK explains how the navel orange came about.  It is an interesting story and I'll post a little bit:

"That appearance of a navel on the orange is the result of a mutation," Moses says. The mutation created a conjoined twin — an aborted second orange at the opposite end from the stem. "Looks like a human navel," Moses says, but "it's in fact a small, second orange."

And the mutation that started it all? A single branch on a sour orange tree in the garden of a monastery in Brazil.

A Presbyterian missionary came upon it in the mid-1800s. It intrigued him that not only did the orange have a bellybutton and baby orange inside — it was sweet, and had no seeds.

He made a cutting, propagated some little trees, and sent them to William Saunders at the USDA in Washington.

"Because the navel orange through that mutation is seedless," Moses says, "all of the navel oranges that we see today and we eat today are genetically identical with the original orange."

That's right. The produce aisle is filled with clones of that one mutation from Bahia, Brazil.

The Last bucket of oranges 

So once I picked the last of the fruit, my son Russ, a horticulture major at LSU, taught me what he knows about pruning the tree.  We cut some branches off of the tree according to his pruning technique.  It will keep fruit from dragging on the ground when the orange-laden limbs are bent over. We fed the leaves to the cows and goat and they ate every green leaf off of it.

It won't be much longer before all the trees begin to bloom and the evening air is filled with one of the most fragrant aromas on God's green earth - orange blossoms!