Thursday, May 25, 2006

Solitary citrus...


Nada writes...

My garden is steep. It slopes eastward and is surrounded by or is in amongst quite a few tall gum (eucalyptus) trees. It's quite shady so it's somewhat of a folly to grow citrus there. We made our choices....lemon (essential), mandarin and a grapefruit. Placed them in sunny spots and hoped for the best. We've had some lemons, no grapefruit which has since been moved and seems alot happier now and a few mandarins. We have been somewhat haphazard with the watering, so although the mandarin set a reasonable amount of fruit this year....most of it fell off, what was left was attacked by birds......so here, we have our last surviving and ripening mandarin. Isn't it a picture! I'm really looking forward to eating it.

5 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Despite the significant water problems I managed to get a Meyer lemon growing up at the Treehouse. I was very attentive to it, watered it, protected it from the possums, mulched it and fed it. After threee years it was about chest height and had a half dozen lemons. Good ones too. I was very proud of myself until my very Green Thumb neighbour casually said on spying it one day "Oh yeah, those Meyer lemons! They'll grow anywhere won't they? They're like a weed. You just chuck 'em in the ground and away they go!"

Sob.

9:35 am  
Blogger Nada said...

Well to be a smarty pants, a meyer lemon is not a true lemon, but a hybrid - lemon x orange. However, your neighbour should really cork it because growing
citrus in the Mountains isn't that easy. Friends of mine in Blackheath with a super garden...north facing, beautiful etc...have had problems with citrus....frost is often an issue.

I really think that growing anything sucessfully just encourages you to expand your gardening repetoire...and really should be encouraged. N

10:17 am  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

My mother-in-law always said that you need frost to make oranges sweet. It's not true, but perhaps there is something in it. Certainly frost doesn't seem to hurt citrus.

8:55 am  
Blogger Nada said...

Frost doesn't hurt them that is true but it can make things tricky especially if you've got days on end of low temperatures. The climate here is more suitable for apples than oranges.

3:55 pm  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Aaah, y'know, I'm proud of anything I can grow, and especially up there. I believe that lemon was the first thing I've ever grown (except for herbs) where I could actually eat the results. Kate made me a Lemon Delicious pudding. Mmmm. What could have been better?

7:01 pm  

Post a Comment

<< Home