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.