Harvest, Schmarvest

A few posts back, I was reveling in the large crop on my orange tree.  Now, I revel not.  The oranges were worthless: lots of seeds, lots of pulp, hardly any juice.  On the plus side, they were easy to peel - a plus that rapidly became meaningless as, one after another, we tossed the peeled fruit into the trash.

What happened?  T'was not the tree.  T'was not the bee.  T'was me.  I selected the wrong kind of citrus for my private one-tree orchard.  Algerian Clementines are self-fruitful but produce better crops if pollinated.  But, if pollinated by anything other than another Algerian Clementine, you get what we got: yuck fruit.

The tree blossomed profusely, smelled delightful, attracted lots of bees.  Ah, but who knew where those bees had been?  What were the odds that every one of those little fellas showered the night before, removing all traces of pollen from their prior day's work, that they then spent the night in isolated clean rooms away from their unwashed hive-mates, that their first stop of the day was an Algerian Clementine across town, after which they made a non-stop beeline to my place?  Any bettors?

Bees don't care where they get their nectar.  Got flowers?  I'll be right over.  Bunch of sluts.  Kinda reminds me of myself in my younger days.

Yesterday, the orange tree became history.  It's gone: cut up, rooted out and trash piled.  The pretty, aromatic blossoms alone didn't justify the special care and feeding I was providing.  In its place is a pygmy date palm.

Pygmy Date Palm

It grows slowly to about 9' tall and wide.

Will it actually produce dates?  

Don't know.  No pygmies around here to eat 'em, anyway.

Harvest!

Since buying my first home 40 years ago, I've nearly always had a veggie garden.  There's some truth to that old saying, 'you can take the boy out of the country but.......'  No matter the crop, there was always a little thrill in seeing the little green shoots break the ground surface about 10 days after planting.  Weeks later, it was especially gratifying to harvest the first crop and have the produce for dinner that very same day.  You can't get fresher than that and the flavor - yum! 
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Take your grocery store tomatoes and deport 'em back to their country of origin; they look great but I suspect that a used Domino's pizza box has more flavor.  Come to think of it, the box likely tastes better than the pizza, too.  Domino's is lousy.  Better yet, have a tomato fight: great exercise, lots of fun and delightfully messy!  A word of advice for the novice tomato hurler: wait until they are really ripe.  You want maximum mess and minimum bruising (of the people, not the tomatoes).  I digress.
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Now, growing our own veggies doesn't fit our life style.  But, citrus does well here so I decided to remove a ho-hum tree and replace it with citrus.  Ho-hum is the common name for the genus Buttuglyus - a huge family of boring, nondescript plants which have, for reasons unknown, an overpowering appeal to prior homeowners - the folks who owned the home before you.  Our LHC home was no exception, had several varieties of ho-hums.
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I planted the young citrus tree, a mandarin orange (Algerian clementine), in late spring, 2010.  We'll have our first orange harvest this month - only 9 oranges but not bad for a tree that's only 32" tall.  It will eventually reach 8-10' in height, and of course, will have larger crops.