Too Much of A Good Thing

Saturday morning after milking I like to walk around the pasture and the yard just observing things. I'll pick up a few fallen branches, fill all the water troughs with water and just give everything a close inspection.  I walked past the navel orange tree and noted that the tree was heavy with fruit.  I mean the limbs were drooping so much with the weight of the fruit, I was concerned about the health of the tree. More on that in a minute.

Notice the right side of the tree

Softball-sized fruit adorned the orange tree almost like ornaments on a Christmas tree.  We love our citrus trees.  My favorite is making freshly squeezed orange juice. Minute Maid just can't even come close to comparing with this OJ.  As I stood by the tree I thought about standing in this same location this spring.  It was cool and I was inhaling deeply as I smelled the fragrant orange blossoms.  Many of those blossoms are now the fruit you see hanging in the photo below.

A Heavy Load

The morning sun was streaming in from the east and I apologize for the poor quality of the photos today.  Believe me, the rays of the sun were beautiful in person.  Not so much in a photograph.  Anyway, if you look below, you can see something that looks out of place and not right about the tree.  The branches on the right side of the tree are leaning.  In fact some of the oranges were touching the ground and with all the rain, they had burst open and had grey mold growing on it. Other oranges had a blue-green mold growing.  What is that?  Well, you might remember from science class a gentleman by the name of Alexander Fleming who grew those molds and discovered Penicillin. That's great, I guess, that we have penicillin growing in the back yard, but I'm allergic to it.  

I wondered why this was occurring and leaned inside the canopy of the navel orange tree to get a closer look.  Here is what I saw:

Darn it!  A broken limb.  Not only this one, but two more in addition.  I went inside and asked Tricia if we had any strong wind.  Negative ghost rider.  So what caused it.  Well, I'm no arborist by any means, but here is my theory.  Either one or both of these events may be causing this:  With all the rain we have had, the wet leaves added extra weight to the already heavily laden limbs, causing breakage.  Also if you grow tomatoes, you know that after a rain, the tomatoes will grow so fast, they split their skins.  Perhaps all the torrential rain caused the oranges to grow too fast and get too heavy for the limbs to support the added weight.

If you look at the pictures, the leaves are still green.  In the photo immediately above, you can see that about half of the limb is still intact, allowing nutrients to continue flowing to the outer limb, even though only it's only through 50% of the limb.  I liken that to someone who has a blockage in an artery.  They can still function, but not at full capacity and the situation should be rectified as soon as possible.

So here's my plan.  In an attempt to save the oranges, I'm going to cut a "V" shaped notch into one end of some 2 x 4's  and prop the broken limbs back up.  This will give some support to them and to keep the limbs from breaking off completely.  I'm not sure if it will salvage the broken branch.  Will it grow back together?  I'm not sure.  Our live oak tree did.  It's a little extra work to have to do this, but the benefit of enjoying a fresh squeezed glas of orange juice this winter is well worth it.