May '13 Lime Harvest

 

 

This is the bowl I used last year. It holds enough finger limes for a cheesecake. You couldn't even tell that some were missing from the tree.

 

 

 

 

 

Total 2013 Finger Lime Harvest: 5.5kg of fruit. YUM!

 

In contrast, the other tree produced zero fruit. Drought periods saw it suffering from brown scale, which I treated with Pestoil and a prune of the most seriously encrusted branches. We'll see in spring whether it recovers or dies, I guess. There was also scale on the mandarin and the Tahitian limes but they seem to have fruited regardless, which just goes to show that pests are a symptom of unhealthiness (no water, clay soil, sloping position, etc) rather than the cause.

What To Do With Australian Finger Limes

Crush 100g hazelnuts and 100g chocolate tiny teddies in a mixing bowl. Add about 2 tbsp of melted butter - just enough to make it stick - and press into the bottom of a 20cm diameter cake tin to form the base.

Take your 250g block of not-in-the-fridge philly cream cheese and beat it in another mixing bowl with 400g melted white chocolate (don't bother about fancy double-bowled chocolate melting, just chop the stuff into a saucepan and heat it on the lowest possible setting until melted). Add 1 cup caster sugar, a 300mL tub of sour cream, and keep beating until the sugar's dissolved.

Squeeze out the insides of a bowl of Australian finger limes. These are the pink variety but they come in yellow, green and red. This sized bowl gives you about 1.5 cups of finger lime "caviar" (read: tiny sacks of sweet-sour lime juice)...and is a great workout for your fingers.

Stir the lime pulp into the white chocolate mixture. Add 3 egg yolks one at a time, beating well in between each one. Whip the whites of those 3 eggs in another bowl before folding in gently. Pour this mixture into the tin.

1 hour in a 180C oven did the trick for me, but others have had this set (firm and brown on top) in as little as 35 minutes, so keep an eye on it. Serve with whipped cream.

(Cor, bLimey!)

Start of Summer!

Some pics to show where everything's at for the (almost) start of summer.

After an amazing waterfall of pink blossoms, there are actual cab apples on the crab apple tree:

Finger limes are getting bigger:

And the mandarins are holding their ground, despite the loss of all the limes (again) from the two espaliers:

State of the espalier, finger lime

As you can see from the weeds, there has been zero maintenance. Not even weeding.

Luckily for me, neither of the espalier limes have died. Indeed, they are actually flowering and little limes are appearing. None of the fruit has ever ripened, but then, none of the trees have ever been watered and they are on a slope of pretty much pure clay.

Finger lime gets ever larger and happier.

Twenty Kilograms of Apples

It's March and the Enchanted Orchard is looking rather grim.

I'm too sad to post pictures of my blueberry bush, which, after giving two or three punnets-worth of blueberries over summer, was killed by the February heat wave in which a week of over-forty-degree maximum temps took a serious toll on the garden.

I still don't water the front garden. It's survival of the fittest. Apparently blueberry was not sufficiently fit.

So I console myself remembering the 20kg of small, perfect, crisp apples that I harvested in early December:



Next time I will be more stringent about not only pinching off all but 3 or 4 fruit in a cluster: The weight of the apples on this branch broke it off, sadly:

If we price apples at $5 a kilo, I guess we can then subtract $100 from the running tally. Also, 250g of pink finger limes, retail value $10, and the blueberries worth about $15.

The mandarins remain small, hard and green, but show no sign of dropping off the tree, despite the heatwave. Hopefully they will ripen at some stage!

State of the Citrus, Spring 2010

So I haven't done anything for my citrus in about 6 months. No fertiliser. No watering.

The answer from the Australian finger lime: I am doing quite well, thank you very much. Here it is covered in flowers:



The espalier lime is also quite content. I did find a single bronze shield-bug on it last week and crushed the stinky thing to its death. I hope more don't show up.



Finally, the mandarin is also flourishing:



Here's hoping for more than one finger lime this fruiting season! And no pests!

Hidden Gifts

Well, I got the fertilising done. What do you mean, march isn't "late summer"? It is, too!

Anyway, I discovered a couple of late surprises. Like this crab apple. Not edible, but very cute. I think it's been stung by fruit flies. A reminder that next year, if I get apples of the larger variety, I had better get the fly nets up quick smart.


I also discovered a Secret Actual Last Finger Lime. I'm pretty sure, it, too, met with a wind accident, and could have ripened more, but it's kinda going red on the outside...and pink on the inside!





Here's the espalier progress.





And the apple trees...the (taller, happier) tree on the right is the one from the nursery. The others are mail-order. Maybe there's a gradient of improved soil nutrients, though. Difficult to judge.

The Harvest That Almost Was

So the end of summer is approaching. Time to tally the harvest of the Orchard in its very first year.

Total yield:

Blueberries: 24 berries
Finger Limes: 1 almost-ripe lime

Yep. That's it.

Grand savings: The cost of 1 punnet blueberries = $3.99

There could have been more, perhaps, if I had watered the garden every day. Here's evidence of the harvest that almost was:




The Small One polished these off as they arrived. It was all I could do to stop her from eating the green ones.




Watching the finger limes grow was exciting! Four of them made it to this size.




Plus there were half a dozen budding Tahitian limes...





...and the same number of little mandarins.





But a hot, dry wind thrashed the trees for three days in a row (yes, we are safe from flood here on the Heights, but it does get windy), and I found all the mandarins, all the Tahitian limes, and all but one of my finger limes knocked prematurely off their stems. Here's what it looked like inside.

A month later, a similar wind knocked the last finger lime down. At least this one was edible. Yum!

So the lesson was perhaps to water every day (like I set out to do in the first place, but life interferes) and/or be patient enough for the baby trees to get some size on them before I start wanting to eat the fruit.

The War on Lawn continues...

Spring

The enchanted orchard sees its first spring!

The Australian Finger Lime has unusual yet quite beautiful blossoms:



Petite native bees are constantly busy over it, tempted away from the tea trees (the only plants put in by the original owners that we left untouched).

One of the apple trees (the Daleys one, in case you wondered) flowered, but none of the others did, so my hopes of pollination are very slim:



And the weeping crab apple is just a font of joy. I can't wait til it gets bigger and even more gorgeous.

The cost of all these trees was fairly standard, I think. The Australian Finger Limes I've already added to the total. The other citrus (2 tahitian limes, 1 honey murcott mandarin) were $35 each. The maples and one of the blueberries, I already had. The weeping crab apple was $150 and the second blueberry bush was $12. Add another $150 worth of potting mix and clay breaker, plus a new shovel for $65 (the old one finally got too bent by me forcing it into clay), brings the grand running total to a scary $1291.

Planting

If you check the date of the last post, you'll see it was made five minutes ago, but in actual fact the logs were put in by the end of August, and the plants were put in shortly after that.

For each little tree, I dug out as much clay soil as my back could take and filled the gap with potting mix. There was one type for the citrus and another type for the maple trees.

I watered each one with seasol at day 1 and day 14.

The trees that I planted:

Tahitian Lime x 2
Honey Murcott Mandarin x 1
Tropical Apple (2 each of Dwarf Anna, Dwarf Dorsett Golden) x 4
Liquidambar x 1
Japanese maple x 1
The remaining Australian Finger Lime
Weeping Crab Apple x 1
Blueberry x 2

I'll be interested to see if there really is a difference in the healthiness of trees purchased from a nursery (for twice the price) and those purchased by mail order.

One of the Anna apple trees is from a nursery (where they told me mail order trees were dodgy) and one is from Daleys. Admittedly, the nursery-bought one has a straighter trunk, but they both seem quite vigorous.

bLimey!

I'm not exactly a model of patience.

When I took my plan for the Enchanted Orchard to Action Man, he agreed to help on the condition that I be PATIENT and not go planting things willy-nilly without the proper preparations.

What he meant was, not planting trees until the beds were prepared.

Not planting them until the drip watering systems were installed.

Not planting them until the paths and other infrastructure were in place.

That's all well and good, but I happened to opportunistically snap up a couple of pink-fleshed Australian Finger Limes, and they happened to be in very small containers, and there's no way they could wait a few months with their root balls all strangled like that...

...so I cheated.

The big skeleton of a dead frangipani that hunched evilly in the existing garden bed nearest the house? I decided it was time for it to go.

This did not involve an insignificant amount of work. First I had to remove all the stupid rocks, which were alive with spiders and cockroaches (but, thankfully, no green ants). Then, I had to pull up the cloth weed matting underneath.

I think the weed matting may have been responsible for the death of the frangipani. Despite two days of rain, the soil underneath the matting was bone dry. It's a good lesson in the Evils Of Weed Matting.

Forging onward, I used the excellent instructions of Michael McGroarty, found here: http://www.freeplants.com/tree-stump-removal-instructions.htm

Lo and behold, the tree came down, even in the absence of a sharp pruning saw.

Once down, I discovered it was too heavy for me to lift out of the way. Yeah. Really should have gone and bought that saw. Anyway, when Action Man came home, he helped me roll the frangipani's corpse down the front lawn, and I was able to plant the Finger Lime:

It was either return the rocks to the Place From Which They Had Come, or, in a sort of frenzied Rock Apocalypse, take them all away and replace them with pine bark, which is what I plan to use in the rest of the front garden. But I was all worn out by the effort of moving just one wheelbarrow full of rocks, and I didn't think my back would appreciate any more shovelling at that point.

So I have sneaked in a tree without doing any of that other stuff. Just one. But it gives me great pleasure to have put something in the ground. Even if it was rather heavy, horrible, clay ground that required much breaking up and mixing in sandier stuff from elsewhere.