When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade.
Or, in my case, you juice them and add them to the soda water you love to drink.
Just below the hallway window where I often pause at are two established citrus trees — one lemon and one orange — and since moving to Earth Rhythms they have given us an extraordinary amount of fruit.
We’ve lost count, but I would guess we’ve picked at least five of our big 25kg mayonnaise buckets full between the two trees since moving here in April.
That’s a lot of citrus.
We’ve given plenty away, but we’ve also been finding different ways to use as much of it as we can.
One of the simplest has become one of my favourites. We juice the fruit, pour the juice into ice cube trays and freeze it. Then we can simply drop a cube or two into our soda water whenever we want one.
The oranges have also found their way into Rod’s cooking. When he cooks corned beef, orange is one of the flavoursome aromatic ingredients he adds to the cooking water, and both the lemons and oranges regularly find their way into other dishes coming out of our kitchen. A recently new favorite of mine is Greek Chicken with Lemon and Feta – the recipe popped up on my Facebook feed so we gave it a try.
One of the surprises for us has been just how well the citrus grows here.
At our previous home, only around 50 kilometres down the road, citrus was something we simply couldn’t grow successfully because of the frosts. Yet here we arrived to find an established lemon and orange tree not only surviving but producing more fruit than we knew what to do with.
Seeing how productive they’ve been has encouraged us to want to plant more.
Since moving here we’ve added another lemon and orange tree, along with a lime, raspberry and mulberry and I have just this week purchased blue berries, cranberry and Chilean guavas to add to our fruit trees.
It will obviously be a while before our new trees are producing anything like their established neighbours, but eventually we’re hoping they’ll provide fruit not only for our own kitchen, but some seasonal produce we can offer for sale as well.
I’ve even saved some seeds from the existing lemon to see if I can grow a few more trees from seed.
There’s no guarantee that a lemon grown from seed will eventually produce fruit exactly like the parent tree, and that’s really part of the experiment. I’m curious to see what grows.
And apparently our existing lemon tree is nowhere near finished.
Despite the amount of fruit we’ve already picked, it’s still covered in flowers and buds — a pretty clear indication that there’s plenty more fruit to come.
We didn’t plant these original trees. Someone before us did that.
Now we’re the ones filling buckets, sharing their fruit, cooking with it, freezing the juice, saving some seeds and planting the next generation of fruit trees.
And judging by all those flowers and buds…
I think we’re going to need more ice cube trays.
