Poor Little Tree

Charlie Brown's Christmas tree was a sad little tree.  All bent and scrunched over.  Sad looking and pathetic...

It kind of reminded me of our satsuma tree.  In its defense, the satsuma tree is a very young tree, but today when I went out and picked the four satsumas off of it, I thought of Charlie Brown's tree as they sort of look similar.

In years past, we had a navel orange, a satsuma, a lemon, and four tangerine trees.  But unusually cold winters with temps down in the single digits demolished, obliterated, and decimated all of our citrus except for the navel orange and the new satsuma tree.  

I was thinking back to the times where we would pull all the fruit off the trees and make marmalade and freeze gallons of fresh-squeezed tangerine juice and eat delicious oranges.  Unfortunately, those days are gone...  for a while at least while we get some new citrus trees in the ground to make up for those we lost.  Almost as sad looking as the little satsuma tree is, is the sum total of the harvest off that tree:

Slim pickin's indeed!  I did purchase a Blood orange tree, a Meyer lemon tree and another satsuma tree that I'll be putting in the ground this spring.  Maybe next year our citrus harvest will be larger than four satsumas!

Prepping for the Arctic Blast

The Arctic Blast sounds like a new slush that they might offer at Sonic, but we're taking it as seriously as we know how.  They are predicting cold weather.  The last time Tricia looked at her phone, she told me that they said it would be 9 degrees in Jennings.  9 degrees.  At that temperature, I don't know if it even pays off to cover plants, but I've got some tarps.  We might as well try.

The turnips that I had planted may be a lost cause as I didn't have quite enough tarps for them.  The greens were going to be for me.  The turnip roots for the cows.  We'll see if they survive.  Under the blue tarps you see is the spinach and radishes and some mustard greens.

The cilantro and the green onions are going to be left uncovered.  I don't know if they will survive.  The broccoli and brussels sprouts are covered.

The swiss chard, kale, kohlrabi and cabbage are all covered up, too.

Here is my new experiment.  Last time it reached the low 20's I lost two tangerine trees and a satsuma.  The navel orange tree and the tangerine that survived took 2 years to recover.  While the navel orange produced again this year, the surviving tangerine did not.  I had them covered, too.

This year I tried something.  In addition to covering them, I ran heat lamps to each one.  This is the heat lamp under the tangerine tree.

The new satsuma tree was small enough for me to flip the garbage can over it with the heat lamp inside.  Who knows?  It may make it so warm under there that it cooks the little tree.

And finally, here is the heat lamp under the covered up navel orange tree.  This is the one that I had just picked all the fruit off of it.

Will they make it?  Only time will tell.  I'll uncover them in a few days and we will report if the heat lamps did the job.

While we were out walking to the barn to do the evening chores, we began to hear sirens.  One after the other.  They turned off the main road and onto ours and stopped at our next door neighbor's house.  We could see flames and then the firemen jumped out and started spraying things down with water.

We didn't want to be nosy neighbors, so we didn't walk over.  The firemen had it under control quickly.  It didn't seem to have spread to their home.  It looked like it was confined to a barn behind his house.  I'll find out for sure, but I didn't see his heat lamps on his chickens like he always has on.  If I had to guess, it could be that he moved his birds into the barn and somehow the heat lamp caught the barn on fire.

No one was injured and their home was saved.  It's a good thing to live exactly one mile away from the Hathaway Rural Volunteer Fire Department.  They were on site in three shakes of a billy goat's tail and got it put out quickly.

Pickin' The Orange Tree Bare

We have some cold weather coming next week.  Like, cold weather that we don't often get down here.  On Tuesday the high will be 29 and the low will be 19.  We're just not accustomed to that. We can't drive in it.  Our pipes aren't wrapped yet.  Our plants and animals aren't ready.  I have a lot of work to do in advance of next week.  I'm praying it won't be as cold as they say.

I realized I need to get the navel oranges off of the tree.  This tree didn't make a single orange last year because the freeze the previous year almost wiped it out.  It did kill two of our tangerine trees.  We only have this navel orange, a tangerine tree that hasn't made fruit in two years because of the freeze, and a new satsuma tree.

I clipped all of the navel oranges off the tree, dropping them in a big bucket.  I have to find a way to make room in a refrigerator so they'll keep if it starts warming up before we can eat them.  A fall-back plan is to make freshly squeezed orange juice and freeze what we can't drink.  Fresh orange juice is just that absolute best.  There's no comparing store bought and especially concentrate to fresh-squeezed.

I can remember perhaps my first experience with fresh orange juice.  We were on a family vacation in Florida and stopped at a roadside stand smack dab in the middle of a huge orange grove.  Of course they were selling oranges, but they had these plastic 'straw-like' contraption that was sharp on the end.  You'd cut into the orange with the straw and squeeze on the orange and suck on the straw and delicious orange juice would flow into your mouth.  It was delicious!

The size of the navels on our tree this year are gargantuan.  Of course I'm picking out the largest one for comparison, but look at this monster!  I have this one side by side a huge lemon that came off the neighbor's tree.  Those lemons are twice the size of those you get in the produce department.  That navel on the left is ALMOST as big as a cantaloupe.

Here's the orange in the palm of my hand for perspective.

Citrus doesn't do well in frigid temperatures.  It's tropical and will easily die.  I've lost many a citrus tree to hard freezes.  I've tried all sorts of things to try to save them.  Mulching them DEEP and HIGH around the trunk, putting tarps over and around them, putting buckets of water stacked around them.  None of that worked.  The trees are all planted on the south side of the house, so the house serves as a wind break from the north winds.  To no avail.

At one of our bee club meetings, a fellow named Jim explained how he saved ALL of his citrus trees.  He put a tarp over all of them, ran an extension cord to each tree and put a heat lamp under the tarp.  He saved every last tree.  I'm going to try out his technique.  I don't want to lose our trees!

Joy Comes in the Morning

For several mornings, we'd hear "beep, beep, beep" and that would alert us that bright and early, the workers on the right-of-way crews were unhooking the wood chipper and backing down our driveway to dump another load of wood chips.  We filled up all of our available space and had to tell them that we couldn't take any more.  That's too bad.  But we have all we need for now.

I zoomed in on the photo above to show you what is going on.  Can you see the steam rising from the wood chip pile?  It wasn't even cool outside, but the piles are heating up.  The chips are decomposing and bacteria growth is starting to work.  Pretty soon we'll see mushrooms growing on the piles.  Some will be edible and some not.  Eventually, all this stuff will make some rich compost.  I move it wagon-load at a time to the back of the garden and layer wood chips and cow manure, wood chips and more cow manure.

We did lose a couple blueberry bushes in the drought, but the ones that survived are loaded up with blooms.  Tricia made homemade blueberry muffins this weekend and they were absolutely delicious.  I asked her how many blueberries we had left in the freezer, hoping we'd not run out before this year's crop comes in.

The bushes are a-buzz with honeybees.  In our beekeeping class, they told us that honeybees can boost crop productivity by 30%.  I hope that is true.  Our bees are certainly working the bushes hard.  Hopefully, we'll have a great blueberry crop.

One thing we haven't had for the last two years is citrus.  The intense freezes we've had for the past two years have decimated our trees.  I spent the last two days burning the dead citrus branches that our neighbors cut off of their trees.  They even lost some.  The only citrus tree we lost was a lemon tree.  The navel orange tree was damaged, BUT, I'm seeing blooms on it!

Same thing with the 1 year old Owari satsuma tree.  We bought another satsuma tree at the nursery in town that is supposed to be more cold hardy (down to 10 degrees Fahrenheit).

This tangerine tree has very minimal growth on it, but it's a fighter.  It has some blooms on it.

My stroll through the yard was a joyful one.  We may have citrus once again!

Picking the Low Hanging Fruit

We had a big freeze a couple of years ago that really hurt our citrus trees.  In fact, I thought they all perished.  But they came back.  Although we got zero fruit last year, this year they bloomed and produced fruit again - not as much as before the big freeze, but fruit nonetheless.

However, the weather forecast showed a big chill moving in.  The wind is howling outside as I type this.  The temps were in the 50's today.  Right now it is 34 and by morning it will be 19.  No telling what the wind chill will be.  One of the things on the list today was doing a better job of protecting the citrus trees in advance of the freeze.  I didn't wrap them last freeze.  I did my best to get a tarp over them.  I also, as you can see below, piled wood chip mulch high around the trunk, well above the graft.  Next task was to pick the fruit and then cover with a tarp.  

This is a grapefruit tree - a small one.  It has four grapefruit on it.  Because of its size, it was an easy one to wrap in a tarp.  I tied the tarp on tight as the winds were gusting 40 mph all night.

While I could stand on the ground and pick the grapefruit, the tangerines were a different story.  I had to get the ladder out for the rest of the citrus - 2 tangerines and 1 navel orange tree.  First, I (literally) picked all the low hanging fruit.  You can see that I picked everything that was easy.  Many people use the phrase "picking the low hanging fruit" as a description of doing the easy things first.  That's exactly what I did. 

Then I got on a ladder and hung a 5 gallon bucket on the ladder where a paint bucket normally would hang if I was painting.  I picked every single tangerine off of the tree.

Tangerines are such a beautiful color, so orange it's almost fluorescent.  They are so tasty, sweet and tart.  Once I picked all of them off of the tree, I moved to the second tangerine tree and picked it clean.

Finally, I moved to the navel orange tree.  There was a lot of big fruit on this tree.  As I was picking, I saw a wasp nest as big around as a softball.  It was cold, so they were all gone, fortunately.                       

Most of the fruit is baseball-sized, but about a third of them are the size of softballs.  We like to cut these in wedges and eat them chilled.  We'll also make fresh-squeezed orange juice.  So good.

We picked three buckets of tangerines and four buckets of navel oranges.  We brought these inside and then I went back out and did the best job I could of protecting the trees with a tarp.  Hopefully, I'll be able to save them!

Then we went over to the neighbors and picked 2 five gallon buckets of satsumas.  We wanted to get them all off before the freeze.  We'll let you know if our mulching and tarping of the citrus trees was able to save them.  I hope we're successful.  We do love our citrus.

The Buzz This Spring

It is still chilly at night.  We have a fire burning in our fireplace most every night to keep us warm and cozy.  However, spring is right around the corner.  There are telltale signs everywhere.  The first is our column of bees.  As soon as the sun comes out and it warms up just a tad, the honeybees become very active.  They exit the column and fly off to find flowers.  They return with a large yellow bag on their back legs.  The bag is full of pollen that has a bit of nectar to make it sticky.

Normally the bees leave during the hot summer.  It must get really hot with all of them packed into the hollow fiberglass column.  This year, however, they stayed all year.  We enjoy having them here to provide pollination in the garden and for our fruit trees.

The blueberries are blooming like crazy right now.  Looking forward to another big year of blueberry production.  I do notice that one of our bushes looks like it might have died, though.  If so, we'll need to replace it.

But the blueberries aren't the only things blooming.  The navel oranges are, too!  This past fall we got ZERO oranges.  The very hard freeze that we got last March knocked the citrus back.  It killed some trees.  What trees didn't die were severely injured.  No blooms and no fruit last year.  This year the navels are blooming.  However, the tangerines and grapefruit have no bloomed yet.  We'll see what happens this year.

A beautiful day gave us the opportunity to go to the church and do a little weed-eating around the flower beds.  We recently did some work there and spread some fresh dirt that apparently had rye grass seed in it.  The rye grass is tall and green.  We raked up all the grass and put it in tubs and dumped it over the fence for the cows to eat.  Boy, were they happy!

I stood by the navel orange tree and marveled at the cows' ability to devour all of the grass we brought them.  They are eating machines.  While I watched, I noticed the honeybees had located the blooms on the orange tree.  The bee was busy as... a bee.

Ten feet to the south and east another bee was busy gathering pollen from the flowers of a gigantic turnip that we are allowing to go to seed.

Spring is on the way, and we can't wait to get in the garden and start planting all of the spring crops!

More Spring Blooms and A Surprise

As I continued to walk around the yard, I noticed lots of spring.  The grass is growing and in need of mowing.  But it is the trees that really caught my attention.  At the border of our property right next to a big pile of wood chips that has been composting for two years is a little clump of wild peach trees.  They always put on a ton of blooms before the first leaves appear.  The blooms are strikingly beautiful.

These blooms will develop into peaches this summer.  We normally blanch them and make peach cobblers - my favorite way to enjoy fresh peaches.

As we move from the edible to the inedible, the Bradford Pear tree is in full bloom.  More of a decorative tree, it doesn't produce edible fruit.  I originally got this tree for free from the Arbor Day Foundation, planted it intending to move it and then it grew too big to move!

And finally, the Redbud tree.  It has small blooms all along its branches.  This tree soon grows big, heart-shaped leaves.

Everything is budding out and then I look at our citrus trees - brown, every leaf on them dead and falling off.  The freeze really put a hurting on them.  On the bright side, I scraped a small part of the trunks of each of the trees - I think it is called the cambium layer, and I noticed green.  So the trees are still alive, despite the dead leaves.

And today we got our first indication of new growth.  Here are some green growth on the navel orange:

And these are some shoots on the tangerine...

Finally, on the grapefruit!

So temperatures down to 14 degrees a few weeks ago and it didn't kill the citrus.  That is great news.  Now, what I'm interested to see is if they will put on leaves, bloom and fruit this year or will it skip a year?  We'll have to wait and see.

Juicy Fruit! It is Citrus Time

This is the time of year around here in South Louisiana when the weather gets chilly, leaves fall from the hardwoods, the humidity drops, mosquitoes are (almost) non-existent, and our citrus trees' limbs are burdened down with a heavy load of fruit.  The bright, almost fluorescent orange color contrasted against the green leaves and blue sky brings a smile to my face.

Our citrus crop this year, while good, is not great.  It is not near the crop of last year.  I attribute this to the two hurricanes blowing a lot of fruit off the trees.  It's okay.  We still have plenty.

We like to eat them, but we also like to drink them!  Tricia and I picked a basket of tangerines from one of the trees in the back yard.  Normally we put them in a bucket, but Tricia likes to fill a basket with them.  Tangerines are tangy.  They are about the size of a tennis ball.

We then went out to our navel orange tree.  The navels aren't quite as orange in color as the tangerines.  They are bigger, though, and are softball-sized.  They hang in clusters from the tree.  We have to support the limbs so they don't break.  Some of these inevitably fall off, hit the ground and get soft spots.  We don't let them go to waste.  The cows see us by the trees and come a running.  I'll take out my pocketknife, cut them in half and feed them to the happy bovines.  They LOVE citrus!

It doesn't take long to fill a basket with these oranges.  It is like picking a basket of sunshine.

Today we'll make juice.  We bring them in, chilled from the weather and slice them in half.  Using an old-fashioned juicer, we squeeze out the juice and then pour the juice and pulp through a strainer.

In no time at all, we've squeezed a half gallon of fresh orange/tangerine juice.  So sweet and tart and delicious!!  We set it on the window sill as it is not only satisfying to the taste buds, but it is a beautiful sight to look at, too.

One last thing, we learned this trick from my sister and my mom.  We took the leftover oranges and tangerines that we had squeezed most of the juice out of and put them in a pot with some water.  We went out and picked some fresh rosemary and added cloves and cinnamon and heated it up on the stove.

The fragrance was divine!

Our "Charlie Brown" Tree

Behold our "Charlie Brown" tree:

We call it that because it reminds us of the Christmas Tree from the Charlie Brown Christmas special from 1965.  You'll remember that.  It was a spindly, poor-looking tree whose ornaments weighed down the branches and made it bend in half.  That's what our poor grapefruit tree looks like.  It had seven large grapefruit on it this year.  No worries, next year it will be bigger and bear more fruit. 

Although we'll only get seven off of our tree, Russ has a large grapefruit tree that borders his property.  His neighbor allows him to harvest the fruit off of it which is on his property.  He's brought us two large plastic bags full of fruit so far.  We have been juicing fools!  Grapefruit are much larger than tangerines and about the same size as our navel oranges, but grapefruit have more liquid content.

In no time at all you can juice a gallon of grapefruit juice.  In fact, it takes a couple of times of squeezing on each half to get all the juice.  A word of caution: you'll be sore in the morning!  It also makes a sticky mess in the kitchen, but the rewards are well worth it.

Due to our semi-tropical climate, many people in the area have citrus trees.  At some point it must get to be more than people can eat, because we see a lot of citrus going to waste on their trees at the end of the season.  We like to make use of all of ours.  What we can't eat, we squeeze to make juice.  The grapefruit juice makes such a nice, pink color - almost like pink lemonade.

According to THIS ARTICLE:

Grapefruit can help lower bad cholesterol,
Grapefruit can boost your immune system,
Grapefruit can lower triglycerides,
Grapefruit can lower blood pressure,
Grapefruit may help lower blood sugar,
Grapefruit can help lower your tax liability to federal, state, and local governing bodies.  (Okay, this benefit is not true.)
Grapefruit is definitely refreshing (That is true!)

This weekend we put some mint leaves in it to make it a little fancy. 

When our "Charlie Brown" tree grows up next year, perhaps we'll have some to give away.  We'll let you know...