Light On Dark Water

Lemons and Satsumas

It's citrus harvest time here. And these are our very own trees. Meyer lemon (a larger and mellower lemon):

OurLemons

And satsuma:

OurSatsumas

I've written before about the glory of the satsuma. I was going to say it was a couple of years ago but I see it was three. This is the tree I mentioned in that post, or one of them. The other didn't make it through an exceptionally dry summer, and, I regret to say, negligence on my part. This is the first year it's borne fruit, and I hope the first of many. The leaves of the satsuma are actually closer, quite close, to the color of the lemon's. I took the lemon picture with a small Nikon point-and-shoot camera, my wife took the satsuma one with her iPhone. Interesting. No doubt the general lighting was different, too. 

I should take a picture of the whole lemon tree. It's all as densely fruited as this shot indicates. We've given away a couple of grocery bags full of them and the tree is still loaded. 

Maclin Horton

10 responses to “Lemons and Satsumas”

  1. Mac

    Btw, the sizes here are misleading–the lemons are as big as, often slightly larger than, the satsumas.

    Reply
  2. Marianne

    Funny, when I think Satsuma, I think of the Satsuma plum, which my dad grew in California.
    Meyer lemons make an especially tasty lemon pie.

    Reply
  3. Janet

    It’s funny. Yesterday when I was at Kroger looking at the Clementines, I was wondering if it was time for your satsumas. Well, I didn’t even have to ask.
    AMDG

    Reply
  4. Sally Thomas

    Oh, wow, those are beautiful. The lemons, especially, look almost too good to be true.

    Reply
  5. Mac

    We went to my brother-and-sister-in-law’s house to watch the Alabama-Auburn game (Roll Tide!), and took a basket full of lemons to them. My sister-in-law ate a lemon just as one would an orange. They’re mild, but not, in my opinion, that mild.
    About Meyer lemons: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meyer_lemon

    Reply
  6. Anne-Marie

    These pictures make me feel like you live in a foreign country, Maclin.
    Do you make lemon curd?

    Reply
  7. Mac

    Pretty foreign to Canada, that’s for sure. Considerably less so to D.C. Yes, we (which is to say my wife) have made lemon curd. Not sure she’ll have time to do it this year. I happened to be at home when the mailperson came Wednesday and had to bring something to the door, and she was admiring the tree, which at the moment is partially blocking the front steps. She talked about what good lemon curd this kind of lemon makes, so I gave her a bunch of them.

    Reply
  8. Mac

    We also have two banana trees, by the way, but they don’t bear, although one of them has tried. They have very weird-looking flowers. They get killed back to the ground most winters, but last year we never had a real freeze at all, so now they’re sort of out of control.

    Reply
  9. Anne-Marie

    Foreigner and foreigner. I don’t think there are any citrus trees, let alone banana trees, in the DC area. When we first moved here the magnolias and crepe myrtles seemed tropically lush to me, but I’ve gotten used to them.

    Reply
  10. Mac

    Actually our climate is not as dramatically different from DC’s as you might expect. The DC summer is very similar, just doesn’t last as long. And DC has a real winter. That’s the biggest difference I see, having moved here from the middle south: things get drab here in winter but there’s never the total absence of green (except for evergreens) that you get further north. We usually do get at least a couple of real freezes over the winter (mid-20s), though we never did last year.

    Reply

Leave a comment

Instagram / TikTok / X

Designed with WordPress