It is the citrus season!

Connie and I look forward to this time of year because of our citrus finally ripening. One of the real joys of being here in Florida is to be able to grow this stuff, and just take a walk outside, pluck a few tangerines off of a tree, and eat them while walking around the property. And the really cool thing is that we now have quite a few trees growing around the property that resulted from just spitting those seeds out onto the ground randomly. Matter of fact, the third picture in this series is of a tree that grew from a seed spit out some 20 odd years ago. So the seeds being spread around now will create a third generation of them. These are Changshi (or Changsha) which is a type of Satsuma, I believe, and they grow true from seed.

Not all of the citrus has ripened yet, as we have several locations and they all seem to ripen at different times. Which is great, because that spreads the "eating" season out over a much longer period of time.

Now with any luck, we won't have a hard freeze come through and wipe out all the fruit, or have a bear discover how tasty they are and destroy the trees getting to them.















The large fruits in the first two pics are of Connie's Pomelo tree. She has 10 fruits this year. We bought that tree and a Dancy tangerine a long while back and just set the pots between two buildings planning on finding a spot to plant them when we had time. Well, they stay there a LOT longer than we had planned, and I guess they are there for good now. The spot happens to be pretty protected, which allows the Pomelo to do so well, I guess. Connie is ecstatic about getting as many fruits as she has this year. It takes her about a week to eat just one of them, though. They are REALLY big! They should be ready to eat in about three weeks or so, if last year was any guide.

This isn't the largest one on the tree, but Connie wanted to pull one to see if it is ripe yet. She said it tastes pretty good, but just a bit shy of being fully ripe.











Hopefully the cold nights coming in this weekend won't damage them any.

Man those grapefruits look good!!! That's my favorite citrus.

I never realized they could get so huge. That thing's the size of a small pumpkin!

That is not the largest one on the tree......

BTW, if anyone is interested (and living in a suitable climate) in getting one of these fruit bearing trees -> http://www.justfruitsandexotics.com/JFE/product/hirado-butan-pummelo-tree/

I believe that is the one we have, but when we bought it (at the same place, btw) the guy who ran the nursery at the time wasn't real big on accurate identifications.

Still only 41 degrees here at 1:15pm.

Supposed to drop down to around 23 degrees tonight, and pretty much the same for this entire week. I'm not real keen on this new year, so far.

So for the new year so far, our citrus trees might be history in 2018. We are going to cover what we can with whatever tarps we have. But I think it's going to be windy too, so that might wind up blowing the tarps off of the trees anyway.

Oh well. Growing our own citrus was real nice while it lasted. We won't be replacing the trees, since this sort of thing could happen again at any time. And honestly, we're getting up in age where running around at night throwing tarps over trees would be becoming a burden anyway.

Rich, nothing lasts forever. We rented a stilted home on Big Pine Key several years ago. I was in awe at the variety of citrus trees and bananas, but that year a hurricane came through and everything was flattened. This year my neighbor lost his 35 foot Bismark Palm to Irma. Mine is about 30 feet tall and survived with only a few twisted branches. Our houses are only about 200 feet apart.

Heck, I don't expect things to last forever. Only just as long as I am still alive. :laugh:

BTW, one interesting way I have discovered to determine that a cold night is heading our way is that spiders will start dropping out of the trees to get close to the ground. Somehow they know... At times in the past it looked surreal with all these spider lines glinting in the exterior lights off of the building late at night.

And yes, I saw some this evening while Connie and I were covering plants.

Don't tell Karl. He will have to stock up on ammo. LOL. One of those Wolf spiders jumped on the back of my little terrier when she went under a bush, and was clinging to her. My wife Sue was screaming bloody murder and running around the yard trying to get away from the dog. The dog kept chasing after her, thinking it was all in fun. I finally stopped laughing and knocked the spider off the dog and stepped on it. You never have a video camera when you need it.

Yeah, I can imagine that would have made a great video. Might have gone viral on YouTube.

I tend to watch a few "fail" videos whenever I happen to be on YouTube, and apparently there are some that are just classics and show up in a lot of "Best of" fail videos. I think what you described would have easily become one of those.

So last night we had some good news in that the temps didn't get as low as they were predicting. The bad news part, however, is that we got freezing rain and sleet, so the tarps on the citrus trees had slush on them when we uncovered some of them. When I got up early there was actually some white crud on the ground in spots. WAY too close to being actual snow for my tastes!

Some of the bigger citrus we couldn't cover are not looking happy at all, and I guess we are going to have a lot of leaf loss on those trees. Hopefully none will get killed outright.

I am seriously not happy with 2018 so far. The weather has been pretty crappy and the rest of this first week of 2018 isn't looking like it is going to get any better.

All I keep hearing from my northern friends is "where's our global warming?" I remember going camping in the Everglades in the late 60's and nearly froze in my little tent. I think it hit 38 during the night. Anyway I hope the citrus survives this cold spell.

Looks like Connie has got quite a meal on her hands! Just one of those sections from her pomelo is larger than the entire tangerine I eat at breakfast. It takes her about a week to eat the entire thing.

One of the weather forecast sites I monitor is calling for a low of 33 degrees tonight. Aarrghh... Which might mean frost here. Hope it's not like last year around this time when a cold snap killed off a lot of our fruit tree blooms. The peach trees are already developing fruit, so they could be history. Just like what happened to most of them last year.

I've heard that there used to be a lot of farms in this area many years ago. I guess this sort of thing, coupled with the normally dry springs here, eventually killed off that idea for the farmers. I've heard that our land used to be farmland, and the stream we have on the north end used to have crystal clear water in it. But the farming was abandoned and when the forest reclaimed the land, the tannin from the tree roots plus all the consequent plant debris changed all that.

Connie and I have been clearing back sections of our property with the idea of putting in more fruit trees, but heck, I dunno. We're getting to the point in age where covering a bunch of plants during the several cold winter nights we get is really not going to be feasible for much longer.