One Crabby Morning

Fortunately, the title has nothing to do with my attitude and all to do with genuine crabs. A group of Tyler's friends went crabbing this morning and came back with a haul. While some of them took the crabs home to their mother, I asked the others where they found them. We are a 45 minute drive from the ocean. 

"The crabs are just here," one said and pointed to an unlikely cassava patch growing by our house. 

They read my dubious look and said, "There is a waterlogged area and the crabs are in the mud there."

The plants behind these guys are cassava

The group of them ducked into the cassava field, Tyler and I followed, and they showed us the fine art of finding crabs who live in mud. Behind the cassava is the waterlogged area they referred to. Though there is very little to no standing water, the ground is saturated enough that the crab live in water "in their rooms," as the boys said. 

It looked like such an unlikely place to go crabbing. 

But the boys were experts and looked for "the crabs' footprints" by a hole. There were a lot of holes.

And then you fearlessly dig in. 

 Like, really dig in. 

And the method works.

Tyler tried it, too, though a little more timidly. 

                                      

You might have noticed there are no pictures of me with my arm up to my shoulder in a crab's hole. I couldn't, see. I had the camera. 

The Orange Deluge

Though John and I have had seriously poor success at gardening, we occasionally eyed fruit trees and thought those might be more down our alley than a vegetable garden. Not so much weeding, see, and how novel to have enough fruit of your own to fill your freezer!

Well, wish granted. We share our property with six orange trees. This past week we harvested and processed every orange on the trees except about a dozen rock-hard green ones. 

It became a family project. John braved the mean, two-inch thorns on the orange trees and picked them; Tyler collected them.

Sophia helped wash them,

and I fell in love with the Bosch citrus juicer. The attachment came with a note saying it wasn't for commercial use. I wasn't sure if six orange trees fuzzed the line for that or not, but it breezed through the season quite nicely. This isn't a Bosch advertisement, but if you have orange trees and a Bosch, the citrus attachment is definitely worth its $30. 

Yes, our oranges are green. It has something to do with chlorophyll coloring the peels. When it gets cold, as it does in the southern US, the chlorophyll dies off and the oranges turn orange. Sometimes fruit growers use gases to do the same job if the cold doesn't do it for them. (You can read more on this by clicking here.) In areas like ours, nobody worries about the color of the peel; the fruit inside is orange, juicy, and sweet.

We ended up canning a whopping 61 quarts of juice (actually, some of those were liters) and freezing another gallon or two. No scurvy for us, just in case you worried about that. I also made a batch of Orange Marmalade and hope the children like it. 

We certainly didn't keep the whole harvest to ourselves. Almost daily we gave oranges to the children at the gate or delivered bulging bags of them to neighbors. 

Actually, most of the oranges we handed out were given as gifts. One day Tyler came inside smiling broadly and showed me a 20 pesawa coin (equivalent to about $.05). I asked him where he got his money and he said, with dancing eyes, "There were children at the gate, so I acted like they do. You know how they always ask for stuff? Well, I said, 'Give me money.' And the girl said, 'You bring four oranges and I'll give you money.' So I gave her the oranges and she gave me this." 

While we were busy on Day 3 of our orange juice project, a friend brought his car over to give it a detail job in our yard. 

(Just to prove my point.
He removed all seats to clean beneath them.)