Gardening Update

Only a short time to spend in the garden today as we’re off to lunch with friends. A quick round up this morning of any bits ready for picking.
Harvest today:
6 x Lemonade lemons
3 x Passionfruit
1 x Small Capsicum
9 x Gooseberries
A large pile of cherry tomatoes and another two nice large ones



The chickens have lain well again this week & I have a dozen eggs from them. They are laying 3 a day now (hold on, doing the maths on this, I think some may be disappearing to the helper gnomes home??)

Hubby has been keen for more of the lemons as he’s worked out they are great for making lemonade and I have to say, it tastes pretty great too. Up until about 6 weeks ago we were failing miserably with doing anything with the fruit from this tree. It was one of the few remaining trees left on the block and we assumed because of the shape of the green fruit that it was an orange tree (actually the picture on the top of the blog is fruit on the tree). We would wait patiently for the fruit to colour up, and of course it never turned orange. That got us suspicious so we did some research & found out it was a lemonade tree. Again we waited patiently for the fruit to turn golden yellow, but it would fall off rotten to the ground before this ever happened. We thought it must have been lacking minerals or water or even diseased although it looked pretty healthy. It had reached the point where even I had given up and had decided to let hubby dig it out & replace it with another new citrus. That was until just recently I discovered via comments on a gardening chat area that they recommend you pick this citrus when it’s just starting to show the first blush of yellow, that once it is yellow, it’s too late. Talk about ‘saved by the bell’. Not just the tree but us too. Imagine we would have been waiting years for another tree to get to this stage.
I would recommend this lemon to anyone who wants to be able to turn their lemons into a drink that doesn’t have the really tart bite of a real lemon tree. These are quite a bit sweeter and you don’t get the tart finish you relate to the aftertaste of a normal lemon.
Our fruit isn’t particularly attractive, it’s quite knobbly and they aren’t the quintessential shape you equate with a normal lemon, but once you’ve tasted them, you’ll forgive them their little bit of ugliness.