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.

It's Citrus Time (Again)

A couple years ago, we were hit with some really cold weather for Louisiana.  It was in the low 20's and I was worried about our citrus trees.  We have navel oranges, tangerines and grapefruit.  Prior to the freeze, I heaped mulch around the trunks, hoping to insulate the tree.  They are too tall to effectively tarp for protection.

Once it thawed, many of the limbs died.  We held out hope, though, as there was green growth above the graft.  We pruned all of the dead branches off the trees and waited.  Last year the trees were still in stress, recovering, and they did not bloom.  We had ZERO fruit off of our trees all last year.  This year, however, we saw blooms and smelled the heavenly aroma of orange blossoms.  Now it wasn't near the blossoms as in previous years, but the trees are still knocked back.

As the year went on, fruit began to develop.  Here are some of the navel oranges on our one orange tree.  They won't be ripe until late December or early January.  They are just starting to turn to a tinge of orange from the green color.

Here are the tangerines.  They are a fluorescent orange color.  They are tart and tasty.  We have two of these trees remaining.  We lost one of them to the freeze.  We've begun to pick a few of these.  They taste SO good, especially after not having any all of last year.

And here are the grapefruit on our one grapefruit tree.  It is a small tree.  We only have four grapefruit on it.  We'll have to savor each bite!

My intent this spring is to plant more fruit trees.  In addition to the citrus, we also have a pear tree, a number of blueberry bushes, muscadine vine, persimmon tree and thornless blackberries.  One of the things on my to do list this winter is to compile a list of additional fruit trees I'd like to put in.  It would be beneficial to have an orchard of various fruit trees from which to harvest - a food forest, you might say.

Frozen Fruit Trees

In the deep freeze of 2021 we struggled in tropical south Louisiana.  We did our best to cover the garden with tarps to protect the vegetables.  Largely, we were successful and our spring harvest was pretty much unaffected.  The fruit trees, on the other hand, were dealt a ferocious blow.  A couple weeks ago, I cut down a big navel orange tree that initially showed signs of coming back, but then kicked the bucket.

Our navel orange tree in the back yard lost all its leaves and was barren for a long time.  Russ, our horticulture major son, advised me to give it time.  I did, and he was right.  Slowly, little shoots of green emerged from brown, seemingly brown limbs.  Once the tree showed recovery, a began to prune off the completely dead branches.  I still need to get a ladder to prune off the top branches, but I'll get 'em.

This orange tree has yielded us hundreds of pounds of fruit each year.  Sadly, we figured that our orange harvest would have to come from the produce section of the grocery store this year.  Until...  Well, would you look at there?  Orange blossoms!  Five months late, but they are there!

Those blooms turn into fruit.  Granted, it won't be the harvest of previous years, but we are blessed to get some fruit after the hard freeze.

In looking at our three tangerine trees, I had to chop one down.  It succumbed to the freeze and just never came back.  We still have two in our back yard.  They are putting on leaves, albeit slow.  One thing I was careful to observe was to ensure that the growth was coming back ABOVE the graft.  Any thing below the graft is from the root stock and would not give good fruit.  Everything coming back is above the graft.  Now, I'm not seeing any blooms on the tangerines.  We probably won't have any tangerines this year.

The grapefruit tree took a roundhouse kick to the chin from the freeze.  Despite mulching it deep, it still took a beating.  It is, however, coming back, but it sort of looks like the Charlie Brown Christmas tree!  It sacrificed a bunch of limbs.  Perhaps without any fruit, the tree will put forth its energy in growing big limbs to support a huge grapefruit crop for next year!

Cajun Engineering - A Titillating Tale of Redneck Fabrication

This weekend was a gorgeous day.  We went outdoors with a ladder and began harvesting tangerines and navel oranges off of our trees.  The old folks say that after you get a frost or freeze, the sugars intensify in the fruit and yield a sweeter product.  I haven't been able to get a firm answer on if this is true or not.  Temperatures dipped below freezing for two days last week, so if this was true, our fruit would be super sweet.  

We went outside an picked several baskets of fruit.  We encountered one small problem - our trees are growing each year and this year was the first year that we could not reach the fruit on the top of the tree.  Even utilizing a ladder proved ineffective.  The trees were just to doggone tall.  What to do?  You can see one of the tangerines WAAAAAYYYYY up there in the photo below, bordering the upper atmosphere.

I went inside and looked up Lehman's "For a Simpler Life" Hardware on the Internet.  I enjoy looking at their goods.  They are hand-crafted Amish products that help enhance your life.  I located a Fruit Harvester tool under the Apple Harvest tab.  It was $29.95.  Not a bad price at all, but due to Covid and other factors, shipping & processing is delayed.  I don't have time to wait.

A running joke in rural areas is that if you give a man a roll of duct tape and baling twine, he can fix most anything.  I began to think that I could build my own fruit harvester tool with a little Cajun ingenuity and it would cost me exactly $0.  So I built my own Fruit Harvester tool that is capable of reaching fruit that grows up in heights on top of the trees where the air is thin.  I rooted around in the garage and in the back of the house, found some odds and ends, grabbed some duct tape and fabricated what I call, "Kyle's Deluxe Citrus Snatcher."  (Patent Pending)  You can view the prototype lying beneath the ladder below in a photo captured by a corporate spy.

Let's take a closer look below.  I had an old garden hand tool whose handle had broken.  I cut off the broken end of the handle and jammed it into a piece of 3/4 inch PVC pipe.  I used duct tape to firmly fasten the garden tool on the PVC pipe.  The tool does not telescope, per se, but it does somewhat telescope by fitting a second joint of PVC into the other for those really high, hard to get tangerines.

You can see an example of what it looks like in action below in a simulated example (but on the ground - not an aerial shot).  You reach up and get the prongs behind the fruit and firmly pull downward.  The fruit promptly snaps off the branch and tumbles to the ground below.

Beautiful fruit that was once unobtainable is now within your grasp!

But wait!  There's more.  If you act now, you can own your own Deluxe Citrus Snatcher...

Sorry, my factory is not built yet.  You'll have to build your own.  

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!

Surveying the Citrus

The seasons change quickly.  As I write this tonight, I can hear the wind chimes on the back patio chiming constantly as 20 mph gusts buffet and announce the arrival of a cold front.  Temperatures will drop to 26 degrees tomorrow night.  Tricia will be bringing in all the plants that she can.  I'll help once I get home from work. 

The changing seasons, like clockwork, also mark the arrival of harvest time for different crops.  This weekend I looked over our citrus.  First, our tangerine trees.  We have three and they are loaded.  Here is one shown below:

These are ripe right now.  We've actually started to pick these and eat them.  Their color is a so bright you almost need sunglasses to look at them.  They are juicy and tart.  Delicious!

As far as other citrus go, they are smaller than an orange.  Little in size, but big in taste!  In the past we've eaten these off the tree, juiced them, made tangerine curd, and tangerine marmalade.  Tricia likes the flavor of these better than all the other citrus.

Here is one of our two navel orange trees.  It too, is loaded with fruit.  We actually made some supporting braces to hold up the limbs so that they don't break under the weight of the heavy fruit.
They are just starting to turn a tinge of orange now.  I read somewhere that the fruit turns the color orange with cooler weather.  If that is true, after tomorrow, these will all be orange!

For a size comparison, you can see that the navel orange is larger than the tangerine. We eat these off the tree, juice them, make a fruit salad with them, and make an olive oil orange cake (a big hit at our house!)

Finally, here is our tiny (but growing) grapefruit tree.  It reminds me a lot of Charlie Brown's Christmas Tree in that it is small and the weight of the fruit is almost too much for the little limbs to bear.  I counted seven (7) grapefruit clinging to the small tree.  The fruit is very sweet.  We harvested less than 7 last year, but enjoyed each one.  No need to add sugar.

And here you can see the relative size of the grapefruit.  It is bigger than the the navel orange.

Over the next several months we'll be enjoying all the citrus.  Then, shortly after we harvest and enjoy all the fruit, the trees will begin blooming and we will be able to enjoy the wonderful fragrance of orange blossoms!

The Last Days of Citrus

We had a bumper crop of citrus this year.  Since late November we have been eating tangerines.  Just last week we ate the last of them.  Not to fear.  We've plenty of navel oranges.  Big, juicy, navel oranges.  We ate a lot of tangerines this year, but we also made tangerine juice.  Last year we froze a bunch of it, but this year we didn't have much space in our freezer.  We drank all of the juice fresh.  The tangerine juice is tart and sweet!  Delicious.  The color of the tangerines and the juice itself is beautiful.

Sunday turned out to be one of the most beautiful days of the year.  As we walked around outside and observed spring taking place before our eyes, I noticed something on the navel orange trees:

The orange trees are about to burst forth with blooms!  But there is still fruit on the trees! 

In addition to the multitude of flowers on the trees that are about to open, you can see the bright, new leaf growth on the trees:

Now, I think that with the tree putting energy toward blooms and the setting of NEW fruit, as well as the tree putting out new leaves, it is high time to pick the remaining fruit off the tree and put it in the fridge.  Naturally, we had already picked all the low hanging fruit.  The remaining navel oranges were at the very top of the tree and required me getting a ladder and climbing to the top.  As I would pick the softball-sized fruit from the trees, I would toss them down and Russ and Tricia would catch them and put what would fit into a five gallon bucket.

This is the last of the fruit from our trees from last year's harvest.  It has lasted us 3 whole months.  The 2019 crop is about to set on the trees once they finish blooming.  We'll look forward to enjoying delicious citrus again from our trees in about 9 months.

Serious Citrus

Saturday morning before getting started for a full day in the garden, I strolled around the yard with my mug of Community Coffee & Chicory.  I was checking out the sights and sounds that I miss out on during the work week.  I was particularly interested in the citrus trees.  Right by the cows' water trough, there is a navel orange tree.  It is the one that is so loaded down with fruit, I have branch supports to keep the limbs from breaking.  The tree has grown a lot and will require some more pruning once we harvest its fruit.

The fruit are all softball-sized and are just starting to change colors from green to orange.  It won't be long now!  Several have prematurely fallen off the tree and I used my pocketknife to cut in half and feed to the cows.  The aroma of fresh cut orange is heavenly!  Rosie and Clarabelle made quick work of the orange and begged for more, but sorry, girls.  Those oranges are for us!

Walking a little to the west, I was checking out one of our tangerine trees.   When the fruit was dark green, it blended into the leaves of the tree and gave me a false suspicion that there weren't going to be many tangerines this year.  Now that the fruit are turning orange and contrasting against the green leaves, I see how wrong my first impression was.

This season looks to be a record crop of both navel oranges and tangerines.

Sadly, our grapefruit tree will not bear fruit this year as it will direct all of its energy toward growing branches instead of fruit.  Next year I'm looking forward to a nice grapefruit crop.  It will still be a couple of months before we pick navel oranges, but Tricia's already begun to pick tangerines.  I like to wait until after a frost as it seems like the cold weather makes them get sweeter!

Saving Citrus From The Freeze

With temperatures dipping into the low 20's, I quickly did some Internet research about citrus.  My question was: Do you need to pull oranges and tangerines off of the tree prior to a freeze?  I read many different articles.  Most said that citrus remaining on the trees will be fine during a freeze and there is no reason to pick them.  However, and this is key, it said that if temperatures drop below 28 degrees, the fruit needs to all be removed prior to this or you will lose the fruit.  I also learned that if you pick an orange before it is ripe, it will not ripen any more.  In other words, they aren't like tomatoes.  They only ripen while attached to the plant (tree).  But all of our citrus is ripe, we just don't want to lose them as it will be well lower than 28 degrees.

So that meant that we had some work to do.  Sunday afternoon after church and in advance of the cold weather moving through, I mobilized our citrus picking crew.  The navel orange tree is so loaded up with fruit that the branches would break if I didn't support them.  Last year with some old pieces of iron that I re-purposed from the kids' swing set when they were younger, I made some supports that hold up the branches nicely and keep the fruit-laden branches from breaking.  It also keeps the fruit from the lower branches from touching the ground and beginning to rot.  In their inaugural year last year, they did the job, so I pulled them out again when the fruit loaded up.

The navel oranges are quite large and are loaded up to the top of the tree.  I had to get out our ladder to pick the ones on the uppermost branches.  I did try to shake the tree to get some of the fruit down, but some of the fruit won't shake off and I didn't want the large oranges to hit Tricia or Benjamin in the head.

We had a good citrus picking system going.  I was on the ladder and as I circled the tree, getting the oranges and tangerines off the top of the tree, Benjamin and Tricia got everything below that was within arm's reach.  I got the chance to explain the expression "picking the low-hanging fruit" to them.  That expression is always used in a business setting, explaining hitting easily achievable goals or targets without expending a lot of effort.  Makes perfect sense when you are actually picking low-hanging fruit.

We were successful in harvesting our citrus.  We filled a 30 gallon molasses tub full of navel oranges.  Some of them were almost the size of cantaloupes.  We'll bring them out of the weather and will eat many of these.  We will also juice some and freeze it so that we have fresh squeezed orange juice to drink throughout the year.

We also filled half of our Gorilla Garden Wagon with neon orange tangerines.  These are a little harder to peel than a satsuma, so we cut these up in eighths and eat them off the rind.  These are Tricia's favorites.  They are so flavorful.  We made marmalade with them last year (or was it the year before?) and we still have some put up in the pantry.  I ate some spooned on top of some bread right out of the oven just this weekend.

The trees will be okay, but according to the Internet, we stood a good chance of losing all this fruit had we not gotten busy prior to the cold weather.  I'm glad we got it done!

Pruning the Navel Orange Tree

This weekend it really warmed up.  As I walked by our citrus trees, especially the navel orange, I could vaguely smell the fragrance of orange blossoms.  What do you know?  The trees were beginning to bloom.  Not a lot, but in a week or two, the trees will be covered in blooms and I'll want to pull up a chair beside the trees and just enjoy the aroma.

While I was thinking about the trees, I made a mental note that I needed to research how to prune citrus trees.  You see, the fruit from the navel orange tree is so heavy that it caused a couple of branches to break this year.  Other branches that didn't break became so heavy that the limbs bent over and much of the fruit touched the ground and ended up rotting.  I want to see if I can keep that from happening this year.

As if on cue, my son, Russ, who is in the last semester of his senior year at LSU and majoring in Horticulture, sent me an email that stated the following:

We went out to Burden a couple weeks ago with the fruit specialist Dr. Johnson and pruned citrus and then last week we pruned peaches and table grapes/muscadines.  I learned alot.  Here was the homework for the class.  Thought you would want to read it. 

How to prune a citrus tree.  A rule of thumb is to cut what is necessary, then what is needed, and finally what is impossible.  First, prune everything below the graft line because those shoots are the root stock Poncirus trifoliata which is thorny and produces sub-par, non-ideal fruit.  Next, lift the skirt. That means cut branches that are growing down to the ground.  Prune away branches from your pants pocket down to keep the bottom of the tree open.  Next, focus on pruning any shoots that are growing straight up or any exceptionally tall shoots that you wouldn't be tall enough to pick fruit from anyway. Of course, prune away dead or decaying branches.  Finally, prune some branches from the middle of the tree so that you can somewhat see your partner on the other side of the tree.  Basically, you are trying to thin out the tree to open it so picking fruit will be less of a hassle.  

So I followed the instructions in the bolded paragraph above and here's how the navel orange turned out:

I realized immediately that I should have taken a 'before' photo.  Suffice it to say that pruning the navel really opened things up.  The cows enjoyed my pruning exercise as well!

Russ does a lot of freelance landscaping and told me that he pruned a lady's citrus last year and that she remarked to him that she noticed an increase in the production following the pruning.  The tangerine trees were pruned right after we picked all the fruit off of them.  They are nicely shaped and seem to be doing well. We'll see how the navel orange does after its "haircut."  It'll definitely be easier to harvest in December.