I love both these guys, I always get excited to hear Kevin intro a video, but I agree that Jaque is sweeter and Kevin is sassy 😉 both are delightful gentlemen!
As a citrus farmer I gotta say nothing beats the squeeze test! Another good way to tell the rootstock from the graft is the leaves. This only works with trifoliate rootstock but each leaf will have three leaflets! One more thing, gold nuggets are very prone to alternate bearing. Ours will produce a ridiculous amount one year then nothing the next.
I make kumquat honey with kumquats from my labmate's tree, aka "kum honey" per my labmates. 🤣 It's great to have stored away for scratchy/dry throat times, like santa ana season or for a cold/flu/rona.
As a Montessori teacher in San Diego (now retired), I had a small kumquat tree on wheels that would be put outside everyday. So fun when we harvested fruit…tiny slices that we all enjoyed! And another time we made an indoor picnic/beach party for local police officer…had lots of handmade insects (including ants) crawling around our beach blanket! Police officer was case investigator after our classroom being broken into the week prior. He was delighted! Talk about turning lemons into lemonade!
I’m watching you pull the citrus off the trees and I can hear my grandfather’s voice in my head. My grandfather owned an orange grove in Southern California in the 60s-80s and he taught me to pick fruit by pulling my thumb where the stem meets the fruit and push my thumb into the junction. If the fruit is ripe, the stem with quickly and easily separate from the fruit. Never, ever pull the fruit from the tree. He also told me not to twist because it could damage the flesh of the fruit and therefore introduce bacteria into the flesh causing it to rot quicker.
Really cool to see all these different citrus fruits! A request for a next video: could you perhaps put the names on screen as well? I'm not a native English speaker, and I live in a different climate where we don't have many citrus fruits, so I don't know most of these and it can be a bit difficult to hear the names 😊
Just came across your channel last week and have been binge watching since. I have so many plans for my mother's dragon fruit that has not bloomed in the year she has had it. Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge!
I'm a huge, huge fan of Cara Cara oranges! I used to get them in my produce box when I was a member of MIsfits. They're absolutely the best! As are the two of you. I hope you both have a wonderful holiday season!
You guys might be getting tired of hearing this, but I just love this style of video. The on-screen chemistry between Kevin and Jacques is amazing. We have a lemon and a lime in our front yard from when we moved into our house a couple of years ago. They didn't do well at all for the first couple of years. I started applying information I got mostly from Epic Gardening and now both the lemon and the lime are exploding. Each year they seem to double in size and the amount of fruit each produce also drastically increase. As a comparison, our nextdoor neighbours also planted a lemon tree around the same time as ours was planted and is in the same sort of area as ours. Their tree is a quarter the size of ours and not carrying too much. I told them about what I learnt from Epic Gardening and they said they will look into it a bit more. In short, thank you Kevin for enabling me to have so many lemons and limes that I don't know what to do with.
love all your videos, the homestead, main channel, and Jacque's as well. I have been watching for a few years, and you were my inspiration to start my own gardening channel.
Navel oranges are a winter crop here, and Valencia oranges are not ready until June. We have 15 citrus trees and can't begin to eat all the fruit. Our friends love getting fruit all year long. Our finger lime is the most fun, and we love the Bears lime and Meyer lemon too. Besides eating fresh we make juice, marmalade, jelly, and dehydrated fruit for snacks.
Just harvested my first Meyer lemons today! I was so excited! I live in the midwest and have them in my greenhouse in the colder months. Have a dwarf Mandarin as well.
Have you considered a finger lime? They're native to Australia. It's early summer down under, and our finger lime tree has a bunch of fruit on it, I'm seriously looking forward to trying them!
Kevin, I was watching an interview with this couple from New Jersey that grows yuzu for local restaurants, and they said, it's sweeter and tastes better after a cold snap. The colder the better.
A standing ovation for your tireless efforts, my friend! Your videos are a result of hard work, perseverance, and a commitment to your craft. And it's an honor to have you visit our channel, we can discuss more about our experiences in harvesting and building farms.
We have a Bearss lime tree for over 30 years. It gives fruit all year long. And so much of it. These past few years have been less because I think the tree is on it's way out.
Great video, blood oranges are very special. I live in Valencia region, Spain, a lot of the citrus groves are being abandoned, farmers only getting €0.85 pet crate or something crazy, costs more to irrigate the trees, so farmers turning to other crops, avocado, pomegranate etc. Very little blood orange left, I will plant some and yuzu, kaffir lime (Citrus hystrix) as well as Bears. You’ve got me excited about testing the fruit when I eventually get some. And yes, yuzu not to be eaten raw, one of the most delicious ways is as a marmalade, a spoonful in hot water as a tea, tasted in Japan and never forgotten, or the rind fermented with chili, a spicy, fragrant relish not like anything else. Thank you for sharing 👏🙏👌
I planted my citrus roughly the same time you did, so now I can compare every year. I must say your harvest is looking really really awesome! I'm still waiting to get a decent harvest. Keep sharing lots of tips on how to make these things grow and produce! Oh and what if hypothetically, someone forgot to label their citrus trees, is there any way to tel the difference between a nagami kumquat and a fukushuwa kumquat?
I'm very surprised you did not skip a season if these were just put in. We have our Myers lemon and its typical to take any fruit off the first season so that the plant can focus on establishing its roots.
Hey guys, any tips for processing/composting massive amounts of citrus fruit drop? We have a citrus orchard of about 7 or 8 trees (~20ft fall) and can't keep up with the production, so we have literal wheel barrows full each week of citrus that has fallen and started to go bad. =\ I don't want to take it off the property and would rather work it into a pile, but knowing that citrus is typically not recommended for compost piles, what do you guys recommend if you have entire piles of citrus??! Thanks! I'm digging the rose arch at the entryway btw. It's coming in nicely!
Love to see a repeat of this at the end of January when the fruit is ripe. Jealous of your Cara Cara orange! My mom's Meyer Lemon tree is around 15 feet tall, and puts out the best and most prolific lemons in the world. My friend's Mexican Lime has the sweetest limes I've ever had, and they are amazing when salt preserved. My mom's gardeners are saying her naval oranges are ripe now (they're taste testing) but we will wait another month to pick them.
If you want to go for full-throttle fragrant citrus and just looking for epic peel, you got to try the Buddha's Hand Fruit! It's a literal air freshner for the house, and you can't get more citrus peel than the Buddha's Hand Fruit ;D
Great tip about the Bearss lime, we have struggled to get limes to live in our Pleasant Hill garden, of course the lime we gave our son in Oakland is going great.
From my family to all of yours have a very Merry Christmas 🎅 🎄 and a wonderful New Year, all the best for the year ahead, may 2023 be better than 2022. 🎉👏👍👌🥰🎅🎄❤️
The ruby colored orange looks exactly like my cara cara and it is delicious. I don't have a yuzu but I've bought and used yuzu kosho which is a spicy citrus chili paste
If you plant and sprout the Usu seeds, you may get a very good perfume potpourri. I sprouted orange seeds and you can pick them slip them into your clothes for scent. Is that the blood orange...that might be the cara cara, I think they are dark too.
What does "satsuma" mean? My parents have a satsuma plum that has beautiful dark fruit and near black skin that is a perfect replacement for the tree they had before...but it is applied to citrus and other stone fruit
LOVE the video! Have to agree with amendria, Jacques is a sweetie and Kevin, you're the sassy pants! lol ;) Anyways....I have wanted citrus foreverrrrrr. I'm in 7b SW VA and finally bought a meyer lemon earlier this year on clearance to just try it and figured I'd kill it. It was 10.00 and I left it in the original container and sat it outside and it grew like crazy. It got a little nippy n got a few leaves but brought it in and transplanted into a much bigger pot with organic soil and sat on sun porch and ignored it like I did during summer and it grew more. Had to bring inside to my kitchen for light and warmth and it has new growth everywhere and is BLOOMING!!!!! I am soooooo excited! I want more citrus now! lol I'm hooked! :) Wish me luck and LOVE your citrus wall!! (P.S. What are the tall spikey plants you are growing next to the outdoor shower?) Merry Christmas!!!!
hello i'm from indonesia. I like grafting nutmeg plants, I often have doubts about how long the grafts have been produced. can the production age be normal like generative seeds?
Thanks for the epic citrus harvest Kevin and Jacque. Always wanted to know where did u get the citrus plants from, do u have any recommended websites for fruit trees❓❓❓ Thank u very much for the video.
Gosh, I wish I could grow citrus in my zone! I’m in zone 7 in NE MS, apparently we can get away with *some* citrus, but not the ones I want to grow so desperately. Lol. Maybe one day I can move to Florida! 🤞🏻🤞🏻
When we lived in Phoenix we had a native orange tree - an Arizona Sweet variety. You can buy them at the farmer's markets there but the CA and FL growers are very powerful and you won't find these oranges outside of AZ. In my opinion there is NO better orange - incredible orange flavor and SO sweet. I wish I could grow these in FL at our new home. Like I said, you can't legally grow them outside of AZ.
Uhh I really wanted to see the satsuma! I’m growing some from seed right now. I got them from Trader Joe’s (southern sassies) and they’re the best oranges/mandarins I’ve ever had. Amazing flavor and so easy to peel. Hopefully one or two is true to seed.
If you want to get a true taste after eating 3-4 sniff coffee beans or sip plain black coffee. It will restore your smell and taste buds. I used to work in a high end cosmetic department and the manager always kept a canister of coffee beans behind the fragrance counter. She knew that after 3 fragrances people could no longer distinguish between scents.
I think your anonymous orange was a Cara Cara, they tend to be darker orange and just lovely! (I'm from the cold north, but citrus keeps me alive through the winter).
I recently picked up some cara cara oranges from the grocery store and they are the BEST orange I’ve ever tasted. Hands down, just absolutely delicious. 5/5 edit: interesting that you thought the cara cara was the Washington navel because they actually were a genetic mutation where a bud grew from a navel tree! They were originally found in 1976 but have only recently found their way into grocery stores.
You might want to thin the branches on that Moro blood orange...if citrus leaves get that packed together you will get white fly and sooty mildew, and that's kind of nasty. And that mystery orange must be a Cara Cara: they're pinkish with a killer juicy orange flavor.
