Yummy Seedy Mandarins

So, how can mandarins be yummy and seedy at the same time?

Easy. I don't water them. So they are small. And full of seeds. But very sweet. I can see why they are called honey murcott. YUM.

A week after picking them all (total harvest: about 2kg), the tree was already flowering and pollinated and rearing to go again.

Onya, little neglected mandarin tree!

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!

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...

Honey Murcott Mandarin

Yesterday, I managed to get the stump of the pencil pine out of the ground.

It was TOUGH. The soil was compacted clay; I felt like I was chipping away at a glacier with an ice pick as I tunnelled my trench around it. Then, the roots were too thick to just cut them with the blade of the mattock. I isolated each one and washed the clay off it. Then, in the absence of functional pruning saw, Action Man unpacked a perfectly good wood saw for me to use. Once seperated from the tentacles that snaked under the house foundations, I was able to work Pointy, Heavy Metal Bar (Action Man: Does it have a real name?) under the stump and use all my weight to lever it out.

I cackled in an evil hag type way when I finally kicked it over.

Anyway, the search for HM Mandarin came to a happy conclusion about forty kilometres from the local nursery ("we don't have any...are you sure you don't want Imperial?"), and the very helpful lady there also gave me a bag of gypsum with which to try and break up the clay soil.

If I'm keeping score of the cost of setting up this garden versus the value of the (distant, eventual) produce, I might as well mention now that it was $26 for the tree, plus another $25 odd for gypsum, citrus planting compost and a bag of pine bark. Adding the $40 spent on the two finger limes, total out of pocket so far is $91.