My Orange Crush
Everything is citrus this time of year.
By the time I was born, half my people had migrated from Georgia to Florida. When my grandfather Charlie left in the forties, he went to work in the orange groves of Bowling Green, and as my aunts and uncles got grown, they followed him.
They picked oranges, worked in fruit-packing houses, ran roadside stands selling orange juice, and even lived in orange groves. They had grapefruit trees in their yards. When we visited them, I ran with my cousins through the groves, marveling and hardly believing the beauty and bounty of dark-green trees hung bright and heavy with fruit. When my people drove back to Georgia for the winter holidays, they brought paper grocery sacks splitting with the weight of citrus.
I was raised on cheap supermarket valencias, which were seedy and sometimes pithy. Florida’s yard citrus was different. It was unwashed, for one thing, dirty on the outside, and it might be seedy. But the taste, oh man, was otherworldly—tangy, succulent, mouth-watering.
This is my grandfather, Charlie Joe Ray, picking oranges near Bowling Green, Fla.
There’s something about citrus that means family to me. And holidays. Seeing people I haven’t seen in awhile. Ambrosia.
It means a large red grapefruit sliced in half, sprinkled with sugar, eaten with a spoon.
In those days, fifty years ago, citrus cultivation above central Florida was limited to the more-hardy kumquat and the occasional satsuma, planted on the south side of a house, and both of these were as apt to freeze as not. The folks who wanted to seriously grow lemons or oranges in southern Georgia had to build a large platform around the trees to cover and protect them from frosts and freezes.
Now, however, as winters warm, the cult of citrus has crept northward until, barring a major weather event and the spread of citrus greening or citrus canker, it may be the next big agricultural boom, of the magnitude of the Vidalia onion or the Alma blueberry. (My friend James Murdock wrote about this in an essay with a killer title, “Orange is the New Peach,” which published in The Bitter Southerner.)
When we moved onto our own farm, Red Earth, thirteen years ago, we began to plant a food forest. Growing citrus successfully in South Georgia had become more common. We purchased a couple of satsumas and planted them in the lee of the house. During the first years we kept tarps and blankets handy all winter, and on the coldest nights we dragged covers over the trees. Within a shockingly small number of years (three, I think) they were producing.
That made us want more.
One winter I heard about a place called Loch Laurel Nursery, a must-see for citrus lovers, located a few hours west. I made an appointment with Mark Crawford, its owner and resident.
I visited midwinter. As I pulled up to a cluster of greenhouses, a tall, supple man in his sixties stood outside eating an orange.
“You must be Mark,” I said when I got out, a fact he confirmed with a handshake. I looked at the orange he was eating. Large as a grapefruit, the luscious fruit had fallen from its skin and lay entire in the orange platter of its peel. A heady scent of orange peel, which as I’ve said means family and holiday to me, blew across me.
“That looks amazing,” I said.
“Would you like to try it?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said. Later I realized this might have been a marketing ploy. What better way to sell me orange trees than show me living proof of their glory?
Mark handed over a quarter. The section I pulled free was tangerine-colored, plump with juices, and smelled like orange blossom honey. My taste buds were not prepared. An orange segment, or carpel, is packed with juice-filled vesicles and the first of these burst in my mouth like a detonation of perfume, tones of honeysuckle. Allow me to go off the chain for a minute: a polka started playing.
“Oh my gosh,” I said now to Mark. “What is this?”
“This is Shirinia,” he said.
My interest in food biodiversity is as much about taste as genetics. Before I wrote The Seed Underground, I had no idea that hundreds of varieties of collards, for example, exist, all of them with different habits, colors, cold tolerances, resistances, and tastes. It’s the same with tomatoes, okra, apples, and almost everything else. It’s the same with citrus. How had I not known that? I’d never heard of Shirinia, never known this festival of sweet.
At that moment two friends who were joining us arrived, and Mark was ready for our tour. On his acreage he had planted mini-groves, quads of citrus trees protected by windbreaks, usually one tree of each variety. Mark has traveled the southeastern United States, gathering citrus varieties to trial. Remarkably hardy Juanita came from Lake City, South Carolina, Miho satsuma from Texas. “I’ve got a little experiment station here,” he said.
Some trees hung heavy with fruit while others were barren, already picked. Some were as tall as 25 feet, others 8 or 10.
“This is a Keraji mandarin,” Mark would say, and he would find a fruit to pick, peeling it instantly and passing sections around. This one tasted like lemonade, with two-inch fruits, perfect for a dooryard. Around a large Meyer lemon bushels of fruit lay as if stars had fallen from the sky. Suns and moons had crashed over the ground.
Mark walked on, parting evergreen branches with his hands and peering into the trees. “This is Sugar Belle, developed at the University of Florida. This is Ambersweet, our navel. This is Okitsu-wase. Now this one. It’s no good. This year I’m going to cut it down.”
“How could you cut this tree?” I asked. It looked perfectly fine to me. It was a beautiful tree, full of fruit.
“I’m a citrus snob,” Mark said. “If it’s not the best, I don’t want it.”
I thought of all the places on my farm where I wished this Okitsu-wase was growing.
A cold front had swept through the South a few days earlier, dropping snow as far south as north Florida. The temperature at Loch Laurel had dropped to 21 degrees, and for seven days in a row the low temperature registered in the twenties. Only one tree, a grapefruit, withstood damage from the withering cold.
I have noticed that, among plantspeople, an eccentricity seems to easily take root and turn an ordinary gardener into an impassioned one.
Mark had started out his botanical career crazy about camellias. He still offers almost 250 varieties. But he has switched his allegiance to citrus. It’s understandable. Both plants can make winter gardens beautiful, their limbs spangled with the roses of winter or dangling with golden globes.
Toward the end of our visit Mark led us to a small clearing in what had been his lawn, where a few young trees were planted. “This is my new craze,” he said.
I could not identify the tree.
“Avocado,” he said. “Cold-hardy avocado.”
In the end I drove home with a forest of citrus trees in my car. I was able to fit in seven of them, and a couple of them were over five feet tall. It was not the safest, driving-wise, and I had to be careful while shifting gears not to knock fruit off my little trees, especially the one in the passenger seat, which was a wedding gift for a young neighbor couple, Ancil and Sarah. I got an Owari, the most popular satsuma, and a Mars, also a satsuma, which was highly recommended to me by Marj Schneider, who organized the Southeastern Citrus Expo in Savannah one year, and a Juanita. I really wanted a Shirinia and a sunquat, a cross between a kumquat and a tangerine, with edible skin, but although we searched the greenhouse high and low, all of them were gone.
Hauling citrus home from Loch Laurel with my daughter, 2018.
The Bounty of It
Citrus has, in fact, become so plentiful in South Georgia and north Florida that we are often the recipient of great quantities of it. On that trip to Loch Laurel, I came home with a bucket of groundfall Meyer lemons Mark gave me. Our plant pathologist friend Albert Culbreath always makes sure we have plenty of lemons (our trees are young and not producing well yet.) I juice the lemons and freeze the juice, which has infinite uses, not to least of which is Lemon Curd.
2 Lemon Curd Recipes for You
This version was sent to me by Edna Williamson, a retired librarian from Jesup, Georgia, who was the librarian when my first book was published. She became friends with my mom and dad, and through social media, we have remained connected, thankfully. This recipe comes from A Year of Teas at the Elmwood Inn.
3 eggs beaten until frothy
1/2 cup lemon juice
1/2 cup unsalted butter, melted
1 cup sugar
Mix all and microwave on high 2 1/2 minutes. Whisk and microwave another 2 1/2 minutes.
This is my go-to recipe for Lemon Curd
I’m pretty sure this recipe came from Mother Leeann Culbreath, a dear old friend who introduced me to this delicacy.
3/4 c. fresh lemon juice (I use Meyer lemon juice, of course, thawed from the freezer if I don’t have fresh ones)
1 T. grated zest
3/4 c. sugar
3 eggs
1/2 c. unsalted butter, cubed
I boil everything in a saucepan until the butter melts and the pudding boils and thickens, stirring pretty constantly. When it’s thick (which only takes a few minutes), I pour the curd into half-cup canning jars, let them cool, and put them into the fridge. Note: I do not strain lemon curd. None of us around here minds little clumps.
You know that wonderful dinner-party idea of making something ahead in small canning jars, then setting a jar at each plate? (My friend Chandra Brown did this with gazpacho at a dinner party once.) It’s genius—one less dish you have to serve up at the last minute. A serving-size portion is already in its own little bowl, with a lid on, ready to go. This is what I do with lemon curd. It has always been my daughter’s favorite dessert.
These are sour oranges that came from a tree in Kay Koppedrayer’s yard in Odum, Georgia. It was “killed back,” as we say, by a freeze. The tree re-sprouted from the rootstock (which is different from the citrus variety that had been grafted on), and the fruit is now wild and sour. However, Raven makes a killer mojo sauce with which he prepares yucca, Cuban-style, and it requires sour orange, so I freeze all the juice I can. The peels in the background are soaking in vinegar in a large glass vat for making cleaner.
When I Made a Post About Lemons
The following came via Facebook from Janet Barrow, for people who have an abundance of lemons, which is a lot of people right now.
“Today I simmered two entire lemons cut in half with a chunk of ginger root and a chunk of tumeric root, each sliced, and added a little bit to some iced tea. It makes a refreshing drink. I may add some to orange juice tomorrow, maybe adding pomegranate juice or some cherry syrup I made a while ago. Lemon is wonderful.”
Sometimes Raven, my husband, who is an artist, does plein air paintings around the farm.
Southeastern Citrus Expo
This awesome grassroots event is happening this year on St. Helena Island in South Carolina, and here is an Eventbrite link for it.
& Here’s a Book to Help You Start Your Orchard
Permaculturalist Cindy Dill, who is an artist as well as a gardener, produced an incredible book about growing perennial food plants in Zone 8 called A GEORGIA FOOD FOREST. She lived in #souega at the time, but these plants and these specific varieties are apropos to Zone 8 anywhere, and that includes parts of North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas.
This book is awfully helpful and very lovely. Although I had nothing to do with the production, I distribute the books. We have a sale going on through Dec. 12. The book is $12.12. I like the synchronicity of that, 12.12 through 12/12! That price included shipping, handling, and gift-wrapping, if you wish; and we can ship it directly to the recipient. You’ll just need to put their address in the “ship to” section. You can find out more here.
Meanwhile
Blessings on you and all your projects as we move through the incredible colors of autumn. Stay in touch.
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Janisse, I LOVED reading this post! Thank you sharing.