Enjoy this encore post from December 15, 2021. And have a very safe and wonderful Thanksgiving.
I am so happy I can grow lots of juicy, nutrient-rich citrus fruits right here at my Bedford, New York farm.
Citrus fruits come in various colors, flavors, shapes, and sizes. Among the most recognizable are oranges and lemons. Less known, the smallest member of the citrus family is the kumquat. I love them all and I find it so satisfying to walk into my greenhouse and see them all thriving. It is actually quite easy to grow citrus indoors as long as it can be kept in a sunny windowsill or in a bright corner of a room. Yesterday my head gardener, Ryan McCallister, picked a bucket full of wonderful fruits.
Enjoy these photos.
My citrus hoop house is located across the carriage road from my vegetable garden not far from my chickens. My gardeners check the citrus house every day, but on this morning, Ryan is also harvesting lots of delicious, juicy fruits. They have been very productive this year.
They will stay in this greenhouse for about seven months. Citrus plants dislike abrupt temperature shifts and need to be protected from chilly drafts and blazing heaters. Dwarf citrus trees require at least eight to 12 hours of full sunshine and good air circulation to thrive.
I have many lemon trees. The Meyer lemon was first introduced to the United States in 1908 by the agricultural explorer, Frank Nicholas Meyer, an employee of the United States Department of Agriculture who collected a sample of the plant on a trip to China. Citrus limon ‘Meyer’ is my favorite lemon because this thin-skinned fruit is much more flavorful than the ordinary store-bought. I love to use them for baking and cooking.
Meyer lemons are also smaller and more round than their regular store-bought cousins.
This is a Citrus hystrix, or makrut lime. It is native to tropical Asia, including India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines. The leaves of this tree are often used in Thai cooking for their delicious flavor and fragrance.
This is a Nagami kumquat, Fortunella margarita – the most commonly grown type of kumquat. The tree is small to medium in size with a dense and somewhat fine texture. These trees are quite cold-hardy because of their tendency to go semi-dormant from late fall to early spring. Unlike other citrus fruits, which have thick, pithy rinds, kumquat peel is thin and soft, and perfectly edible.
Calamondin, Citrus mitis, is an acid citrus fruit originating in China. Calamondin is called by many names, including calamondin orange, calamansi, calamandarin, golden lime, and musk orange.
The fruits of the calamondin are small and thin skinned. Its juice can be used like lemon or lime to make refreshing beverages, or to flavor fish and various soups.
These calamondins are still young and green. One calamondin is about 12-calories and like all citrus, packed with vitamin-C.
This is citrus hybrid I purchased in Florida during a recent visit – I love its striped fruit pattern.
And here is another – I always look out for rare and interesting varieties. This fruit has classic yellow skin but bearing vertical stripes of green.
The leaves are also marked with cream and soft green.
Citrus flowers are either solitary or clustered – and one can practically smell their beautiful aroma.
All citrus fruits are members of the genus Citrus and many of them have thorns on their trees. Some of the most common citrus trees to sport thorns are Meyer lemons, most grapefruits and key limes. Thorns provide protection from predators, specifically hungry animals that want to nibble away at the tender leaves and fruit.
Another citrus bearing fruit right now is the Citrus australasica, the Australian finger lime or caviar lime. Australian limes are a species of the plant genus Citrus that are native to Australia and Papua New Guinea. They have a minty, citrus aroma with a tangy, sweet, and slightly sour, floral, lemon-lime flavor.
It’s important to store the plants so none of them touch. This prevents a lot of diseases from being transferred specimen to specimen.
Here’s one full bucket of various citrus fruits. I always have enough lemons for whatever I need. I can’t recall the last time I actually bought a lemon.
Citrus sinensis ‘Trovita’ is thin skinned and develops without the excessive heat most oranges need to produce good fruit. The fruit is smaller, juicier, and milder in flavor.
And this is my beautiful Citrus limon ‘Ponderosa’ or ‘The American Wonder Lemon’ – this plant produces a thick mass of highly fragrant flowers, which become tiny lemons. Those lemons get bigger and bigger, often up to five pounds! This ‘Ponderosa’ citrus tree is pretty large, so it is always stored in the front just behind the doors.
Here’s a closeup of one of its fruits – it is bigger than the palm of one’s hand.
Once all the fruits are harvested, they are brought up to my Winter House where they are cleaned and placed into my refrigerator. It is so nice to know I can grow all these wonderful fruits right here at my farm. I only wish I had a bigger greenhouse, so I could grow many, many, many more — maybe one day.
While we're all busy getting ready for Thanksgiving, here's another encore blog you'll enjoy - it was first published in October of 2021.
Here in the Northeast, autumn is a wonderful time to enjoy the changing foliage, but it's also a good opportunity to appreciate the many seeds, berries, and cones that grow on the trees and shrubs.
Many birds and small animals rely on the fall harvest of berries and seeds. They provide calories and crucial nutrients that help them thrive during the colder months when other natural food sources are nonexistent or buried in the snow. They also add beauty to the landscape when most flowers are already gone. Here is a sampling of some of the many seed pods, berries, and cones that are around my Bedford, New York farm.
Enjoy these photos.
Have you ever heard about the beautyberry, Callicarpa? Tiny spring flowers produce clusters of these magenta colored bird berries that remain on these spreading shrubs after the leaves drop.
These shrubs are outside my guest guest house and show off beautiful color this time of year. The fruits become a good food source for many different birds, including mockingbirds, robins, and brown thrashers.
If you follow this blog regularly, you may recall learning about the bur oak, Quercus macrocarpa. We planted two rows along the outsides of the boxwood allee, one on the left and one on the right. The leaves of the bur oak are easy to identify. They are alternate, simple, six to 12 inches long, roughly obovate in shape, with many lobes. When mature, the two middle sinuses nearly reach the midrib dividing the leaf nearly in half.
This is the acorn of the bur oak. The bur oak acorn is very large – macrocarpa is Latin for “big fruit”. The cap of the acorn is called the involuchre and nearly covers the entire nut and is very hairy. As the acorns mature, the cap and seed will turn brownish tan.
This is called a Chinese Scholar tree. The Scholar tree is a deciduous, round-headed tree growing up to 50 feet or taller with a somewhat open look while young.
It has compound leaves with seven to 17 two-inch-long leaflets.
The pods of Scholar trees appear in the fall and look similar to dangling beads.
This tree is an Atlas cedar. I have several planted down behind my chicken coops not far from a stand of tall white pines. Cedrus atlantica, the Atlas cedar, is a distinctive evergreen. Its silvery blue to bluish-green needles are eye-catching in any landscape.
All members of the genus Cedrus produce upright, barrel-shaped cones. These are male cones, which are smaller than the female cones and don’t stay on the tree for very long.
Cornus kousa is a small deciduous tree that can grow up to 40 feet tall. It is in the flowering plant family Cornaceae. Common names include kousa, kousa dogwood, Chinese dogwood, Korean dogwood, and Japanese dogwood. It is native to East Asia including Korea, China and Japan.
This is a fruit of the kousa which is edible. The soft pulp is sweet with a similar flavor to a ripe persimmon but it also has hard seeds inside.
These are the seeds of the magnolia tree. In the fall after the flowers are long gone, Magnolia seed pods, which resemble exotic-looking cones, spread open to reveal bright red berries. Birds, squirrels, and other wildlife love these tasty fruits. Inside the berries are the magnolia seeds.
I am sure many of you recognize the leaves of the ginkgo. The leaves are unusually fan-shaped, up to three inches long, with a petiole that is also up to three inches long. This shape and the elongated petiole cause the foliage to flutter in the slightest breeze.
Here are fallen ginkgo tree fruits. The most noticeable thing about these is their smell. Have you ever smelled one? It is hard to miss, and the stench is quite disagreeable. The outer, nasty smelling pulp is known botanically as sarcotesta. The ginkgo seeds inside contain urushiol, which is the same chemical that causes poison oak, ivy, and sumac, so always wear gloves and protect your skin whenever handling the fruit.
Here is one seed separated from its fruity encasement. It is a single hard-shelled seed enclosing an edible kernel. The kernels are often roasted and used in Asian cuisines.
Catalpa, Catalpa speciosa, is another tree I love – this one located just outside my carport. Mature catalpas can reach heights of 50 feet or more. They are very showy with their white orchid-like flowers in June, huge leaves, and cigar-shaped fruit.
In autumn, mature catalpa seed pods turn brown and often hang on the tree through late fall and into winter.
This is one of my many Stewartia trees. Stewartia is a species of flowering plant in the family Theaceae, native to Japan and Korea. All varieties are slow-growing, all-season performers that show off fresh bright green leaves in spring. Do you know why I love Stewartia trees? Well, Stewart is my last name after all. However, there is no relation. “Stewartia” is named for Scottish nobleman and botanist, John Stuart, who had imported the plant to his personal London garden. He later served as British prime minister from 1762 to 1763.
Stewartias feature stunning bark that exfoliates in strips of gray, orange, and reddish brown once the trunk attains a diameter of two to three inches.
Stewartias produce woody ovoid capsules of seeds each of which has five seed chambers containing up to four seeds.
And here is a rose bush laden with hips. The rose hip or rosehip, is also called the rose haw and rose hep.
Rose hips are the seed pods of roses. They look like small crab apples and are typically red to orange, but ranges from dark purple to black in some species. Rose hips remain on the plant long after rose blooms fade. I hope these photos help you appreciate the seeds, berries, and cones of the trees and shrubs in your own backyards. They are all beautiful in their own right and important food sources for our woodland friends.
While my blog team is away for this Thanksgiving Week, I thought I'd share some of our favorite entries. Here's one originally posted last November 20, 2023.
Whether you're preparing a holiday dish or rushing to make a quick weekday meal, fresh herbs make any recipe stand out.
Herbs are one of my favorite things to grow in the garden. Every year, I grow lots of parsley, cilantro, thyme, rosemary, dill, basil, oregano, sage, chervil, and more. They're easy to grow and they're prolific - almost every herb is a cut-and-come-again variety, meaning one can harvest from the same plant more than once. Herbs can also be grown in raised beds or in containers, from seed or by transplanting. And, many herbs last until the first hard frost. Here at my Bedford, New York farm, we were still picking various herbs from the garden just last week.
Here are some photos, enjoy.
I am so pleased with my new raised bed garden. We had such a wonderful summer – so many delicious and nutritious vegetables and herbs grew here this year.
If you follow my blog regularly, you may have seen how I designed and planned this half-acre garden. It is located closer to my home just south of the stable in a pasture that was once used by my donkeys.
Our summer crops are done, but the weather was still quite mild last week, so many of the herbs were still doing well. These cuttings are parsley, cilantro, sage, chervil, rosemary, oregano, thyme, and fennel.
Here is sage. Salvia officinalis, the common sage or sage, is a perennial, evergreen subshrub, with woody stems, grayish leaves, and blue to purplish flowers. It is a member of the mint family Lamiaceae and native to the Mediterranean region. It is popular in fall and winter cooking and baking.
This year, I planted herbs at both ends of each bed in my garden. Here is the sage growing at the end of one of our center beds, where we also grew beans, cucumbers, and sunflowers. Sage should be planted in well-draining soil and in full sun.
Oregano is also an herb from the mint, or Lamiaceae family. Oregano is strongly aromatic and has a slightly bitter, pungent flavor.
Oregano leaves are generally oval, dark green, and positioned in opposite pairs along the stems. Some varieties have fuzzy leaves.
I always grow parsley – I use it in my daily green juice. Parsley, or garden parsley, is a species of flowering plant in the family Apiaceae. It’s great in sauces, soups, and stews. It may be finely minced and rubbed on meats before cooking. It is often added to pesto and salads and it is commonly used as a garnish.
This is curly parsley. It is a bit more bitter than flat parsley, and has a light fragrance.
Over the summer, our curly parsley grew so well. Everyone who visited the gardens admired our crop of curly parsley.
Thyme, Thymus vulgaris, is an herb rich in vitamins A and C. The flowers, leaves, and oil are commonly used to flavor foods.
Here is our thyme growing in the bed. The flowers are tiny, tubular, and colors vary from white, pink, and purple. The flowers of thyme are rich in nectar and attractive to bees and butterflies.
Rosemary, Rosmarinus officinalis L. is an evergreen bushy shrub which grows along the Mediterranean Sea, and sub-Himalayan areas. It is widely used as a spice when cooking, especially in Mediterranean dishes.
Here is our rosemary planted around the asparagus bed. Everything was so prolific.
We also grew dill. Dill, Anethum graveolens, is an annual herb in the celery family Apiaceae. It is native to North Africa, Iran, and the Arabian Peninsula. Dill has a distinctive taste which is likened to fennel and celery. Closely related to parsley, its fresh aroma is popularly used with fish and seafood dishes.
The leaves of fennel are almost identical to those of dill. Fennel plants, which are native to the Mediterranean basin, have a bulbous base that can be eaten like a vegetable, feathery fronds that are used as an herb, and seeds that can be dried for a spice.
And then there is cilantro. Some love it and some hate it. Of course some of this dislike may be preference, but for those whom the plant tastes like soap, the issue is genetic. Some individuals have a variation in a group of olfactory-receptor genes that allows them to strongly perceive the soapy-flavored aldehydes in cilantro leaves. I love cilantro and often call it coriander. Cilantro is the name for the leaves and stems of the coriander plant. When the plant flowers and turns to seed, the seeds are called coriander.
Another popular herb in my garden is basil. Basil is an herb in the mint family that is in season primarily June through September. It adds flavor to meals, and its nutrients are said to have some health benefits, such as reducing stress and supporting the cardiovascular system. Sweet basil plays a role in many Mediterranean, and particularly Italian, cuisines.
Basil is a tender plant that can be sown outdoors once temperatures warm up in early summer.
Now, the garden is nearly all cleaned up for the season. We’ve already started planting our crops in the vegetable greenhouse. But come spring, we’ll be out here again, tending the beds for another year of delicious, natural foods.
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