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.)