Coming into spring we are almost at an end of the Citrus fruiting season here in Auckland. Its been a season of mixed results but there has been a bounty of fruits without doubt. A lot of my citrus trees have been the ground for at least 2-3 years now and are at the stage where they are well settled in to their position and have established root systems and healthy canopies. Most of the trees are healthy and in good condition with only a few showing signs of Verricosis or Citrus Scab. These will need to be regularly sprayed with Copper this year to try and lessen the disease which is a bit of a blight on the leaves and fruit.
Success:
I have had bumper crops from my Lemons this year which have been supplying my cafe with a regular stream of fruit. This has always been a goal of my gardening to be able to supply the cafe with produce that we can actively use. I only have two trees (one Meyer and one Eureka) but they have both been quite prolific.
Another prolific fruiter has been my surprise Grapefruit with its first season of over 30 fruits! As i detailed in my post I'm not a fan of grapefruit and was planning to pull the tree out. On second thought though, i decided to leave it in. I have been juicing the very ripe Grapefruits recently and with some added sugar is quite enjoyable.
Limes have also been in abundance this season and since cutting back on our alcohol consumption of late we still have quite a few hanging on the tree yellow & ripe waiting for a Margarita to come along. I have at least 8 Lime trees now of which 6 are at maturity so there will only be more next year. I have my first fruit of my Key Limes too which is great to try out they have a lovely floral light flavour with a more intense "Limey" flavour. They are seeded though and very thorny.
Cara Cara Oranges were pretty good from my little two year old tree. After a set back last season where it's central leader snapped under the weight of its fruit it came back strong this year and produced about 7 fruits. They had pretty good deep colour as you would expect from Cara Cara and nice rich naval orange flavour.
As a success & a failure has been my Mandarinquat finally this year i have two fruit! Sadly though they has some sort of fungus attack so are covered in unsightly scab. I think this is the same Verricosis that has afflicted the neighbouring Lime tree. So i think this year i will spray these two with some Copper on the regular.
Mandarins were pretty good this year, most of mine however are quite young as only in the last year began to appreciate the bounty of Mandarins. I got three of my new Okitsu Wase which were very early in the season and the first of all my citrus to ripen. My Miho was quite prolific with about 10 fruit but because its still fairly small & young the fruit resulted in being fairly small in relation to tree size to fruit quantity. Nice flavour though. Silverhill i had 3 fruit. The Scarlett Burgess had about 20 fruit all quite small too. I attribute this to the neighbouring Lime shading it out of light for a while and so it didn't have enough energy to make the fruit large. I have recently trimmed this Lime back to give this tree sufficient space.
My Calamondin was quite laden this year with fruit I'm still not sure what i can do with these but i made some Calamondin cordial which was pretty yum with some sparkling water. The fruit seem a bit bigger this year also.
Disappointments:
Unfortunately i only had one fruit from my Tangor but it was yum. It was quite large and easy to peel but the flavour was a little lacking and little bit dry, as i left it hanging on the tree for some time to ripen up fully.
Blood Oranges were quite a failure this year my Moro finally decided to fruit this year for the first time but all the fruit were very small and none had any colouration! I did get one fruit off my Tarrocco which was bigger in size and faint colouration around the outer flesh.
My Buddha's Hand tree is very healthy and well settled into its spot in the garden and managed to produce about 6 good sized hands. The only thing is that the tentacles are like a haven for Ants and pests to nest in. So unfortunately all my hands succumbed to being infested. I think next year i will need to regularly spray inside the tentacles to keep them pest-free.
My older Yuzu tree did not fruit this year as i moved him from its home in the middle of the vege bed into the ground so he was a little upset about this i imagine. The second younger Yuzu however gave me 3 fruit which were good.
