Wednesday, December 02, 2009

The Five of Us Wouldn't Survive

If we had to depend on our gardening skilz for food. Last summer I had two tomatoes total. Not last summer but the summer before we planted a Key lime tree and a Satsuma tree(think Clementines). Last Autumn my Key lime tree was covered in Key limes, then we had a hard freeze and I didn't believe in that whole "oh Lordy it's going to freeze let's put quilts on our plants" and well the Key lime tree died, it's made a comeback, the leaves smell all limeyish but not one single lime or bloom. The Satsuma, all our hopes were in the Satsuma until the then 12 year old crashed into it while making a seriously awesome catch of the football. The Satsuma split, we tied it together with either bread ties or zippy ties, I can't remember and it's a pseudo-hurricane at the moment outside so take my word for it we tied this Satsuma branch together and while she didn't flourish she did produce a single Satsuma. Here's the citrus grove, a.k.a. our front yard.
Here's our harvest.


Here's the farmer and I use the word "farmer" very loosely.


And here's the crop. What should we do? Juice it, make an orange cake? Uh no.




We decided to cut her in half and eat her in wedges and she was mighty tasty. Yes she was. While our crop wasn't big on quantity it was one good quality Satsuma. We didn't even have to bring in the stunt orange and yeah, I had one ready to go because I could just see cutting into this baby and her being dry. Completely, utterly dried out on the inside but she wasn't. And we feasted. So our orange crop lasted from harvest to plate for about oh, five minutes and that's because we couldn't find a knife to cut her open with as I was in the middle of Thanksgiving cooking and every utensil in the kitchen was in need of a washing.



Thankfully we had chocolate chip pie and pumpkin pie to fill the lack of homegrown Satsuma void. And it was good.





And because doesn't everyone love seeing a nekkid Tom turkey here's mine, weighing in at just under 22 lbs ready to be tucked into a nice warm oven. Yep, that's a stick of pure butter poking out of his belly and globs of butter stuck under his skin. Butter is good, very, very good when it comes to turkey baking, almost as important as Tom turkey himself.
I hope everyone had a blessed and bountiful Thanksgiving and if you don't celebrate the U.S. holiday I hope that your fourth Thursday in November was good one.






6 comments:

MamaLadyBug said...

Dang woman! That is one mighty perty turkey!!! And so happy you had a mighty tasty harvest.

Katrina said...

That's one decadent turkey :-). The pies look yummy too.

One clementine is better than none. I bet as the tree grows you get more.

Maureen said...

I bet that satsuma just tasted great though - even if there was just the one...

Daffycat said...

R
O
F
L
O
L
Your story about the orange harvest is hysterical. Even DH laughed when I told him about your stunt orange.

Siobhán said...

Hey, every farmer starts somewhere, right? The pies look good!

Farmgirl Susan said...

Congratulation on your delicious citrus harvest! Reminds me of a $40 lime I grew once. ;)