Oranges

Monday, March 17, 2025

Less than a year ago we bought a Valencia Orange Tree for the other corner of our yard. We now have an Owari Satusma Mandarin Orange on the south side of the yard and a Valencia Orange on the north side. The Mandarin is easy to peel and great for eating while the Valencia makes great juice.

This is the second year for our Mandarin and it produced a ton of small mandarins. They were delcious and we started eating them around Christmas time. I have since learned that if I give them plenty of water they will grow much larger oranges.

Our Valencia is less than a year old but it still had several large delicous looking oranges on it. It is difficult to know when oranges are ripe because they turn orange early and the color is not a good indicator of ripeness. Everything we read said the Valencia should be ready in March.

This weekend we checked the oranges. They were ripe and maybe a little too rip so we picked all six oranges. It looked funny with these six huge oranges on a tiny little tree. We juiced them all and enjoyed some very delicous and very fresh orange juice.

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The color "orange" is named after the fruit and not the other way around. Before the orange was introduce from China in the 1,300's the color didn't have a name.

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