Glover Gardens is living up to its name in the orange department!
Only 27 Oranges in 2017
Two years ago, our little tree had only a couple dozen oranges on it just before a freeze-provoked emergency moonlight harvest.
A Bumper Crop in 2019
Now in its 4th year, the tree gave us over 200 oranges. Riches!
Happy Harvester
The Grill-Meister snapped a pic while I was happily harvesting high up in the tree earlier this month (ladder not shown).
Nature’s Art
Oranges are so pretty. I almost didn’t want to harvest them, because the look of them on the trees was so … inviting and reassuring, the promise of goodness tomorrow.
A Bushel and a Peck
I had to get a bigger juicer to handle all of the oranges. The turquoise tub below was filled three times over with our 2019 crop. I think that’s about a bushel and a peck, don’t you?
Don’t laugh – we had to buy a new chest freezer to house our OJ! We gave the giant old one away on Freecycle a while back, since we’re empty-nesters and couldn’t imagine needing more freezer space than we have with the inside refrigerator and the garage refrigerator…but we were wrong, wrong, wrong. We didn’t know we’d be successful orange growers! The orange juice harvest is the only thing in the new freezer. You can see our recycling efforts in action with regard to the plastic containers…no single use plastics for us! Chinese restaurant delivery soup containers are great for frozen OJ.
Straight, No Chaser
The juice is so good! It tastes like liquid sunshine. It’s a magic elixir that needs no mixer.
A Lovely Relationship
Orange and chocolate are special friends! Here are links a couple of Glover Gardens recipes that take advantage of the loveliness of oranges and the richness of chocolate. (I had to make use of our wonderful bounty!)
Valentine’s Day Truffles á l’Orange
Decadent Chocolate Orange Pots
We’ll trade you 500 Creole tomatoes 🍅 for some 🍊 and a partridge in a 🍐 tree.
LOL, all we’d need after that is some geese a’layin. Y’all grow ‘maters, do ya?
Everything grows here. We got creole tomatoes, strawberries (if the dogs don’t eat them), corn, peppers, bell peppers, all kinds of herbs including a basil bush that is three feet around.
Wow! We have herbs galore but had to pause the big gardening for a few years. How in the heck do you have time for all that?
It relaxes musical miss. That, and cooking. When she’s making red gravy she likes picking tomatoes off the vine and cooking with them. And, as an old creole man once told me, “plant it, stuff just grows down here.”
I would love to have the red gravy recipe, or even just a picture. What does she put it on?
I’ll send it to you. It’s not a secret. She also makes her own pasta by hand, which is where it goes mostly. She thickens it, adds other spices and uses as a marinade for pork butt roasts. She might was well be making a Black Russian since she uses espresso ground beans and vodka as the main additional flavors. The real key is the tomatoes. Creole tomatoes grown in our soil have a spicy taste to them.
I LOVE oranges, and chocolate too. This tree looks very healthy. They do have resting years and good producing years. We have a lot of oranges where I live in Southern California. The recent hard rains and high winds damaged a lot of them, breaking off the younger branches, and doing quite a bit of damage. I am not certain that anything could have helped that. They all have smudge pots, but I don’t think those could have helped this.