When Life Gives You Lemons...

...and limes then use them! And we have too.

This morning the Kinder Major and I put the new plastic on the hoop house. I'm using cheap builder's plastic to cover it with so it only last seven to eight months which is enough to get through the winter. I'm hoping next year to buy some real UV resistant greenhouse plastic so I'll only have to do this every three or four years.

Cleaning up the frame then stretching the plastic took most of the morning. In the afternoon after Diana and the kids went to visit some family friends I moved all of the container citrus over by the house so I could start prepping it to move in. I had wanted to spray them with hort oil in an attempt to eliminate the leaf miners that have plagued me all year, but the wind picked up later in the day so decided I'd leave it until next weekend. I did fertilize the whole lot though.

To the left here is a photo of one of the Key limes in the foreground with the Eureka lemon behind it both loaded with ripe fruit. I'll be picking all the Keys this week to juice them as they are completely ripe now. We've been using them for weeks and those are the ones we hadn't gotten to yet. The lemons I'll leave a while longer as they've only just now started to color up. Everything we don't eat fresh will be juiced then frozen.

The second photo is the entire container citrus collection as well as my true Bay (Lauris nobilis) and a Cherry of the Rio Grande which is an obscure semi-tropical fruit that I'm growing out as an experiment. If I get good growth over the winter I'll plant it out in the driveway flowerbed next Spring. It's supposed to be cold hardy down to twenty degrees when mature.

You can't really make them out very clearly, but the two little Tahiti (Persian) limes also have fruit that need to be picked before they ripen. I like a ripe Key lime but the Tahiti limes take on an off-flavor if allowed to ripen completely. Both of them just finished blossoming a little while ago so have lots of little fruit on them as well. Also not very clear is the little Meiwa kumquat with a nice fruit set for its size that is just beginning to color up. Hopefully they'll be nice and pretty come Christmas because I want to use it in the house as decoration. I have a larger one in the driveway flowerbed. The Kinder Minor loves the kumquats and has been most put out that we won't let her pick them. She doesn't understand not-quite-ripe yet.

All of the citrus is looking a bit bedraggled at the moment due to the leafminers. I'm hoping to get some good growth over the winter to make them look pretty again.

The final photo is an unobstructed view of the hoophouse. Same one as last year but with new plastic. I'm thinking next year I may build a still larger one incorporating what I've learned from the previous two houses and with a real door.

This evening I processed several dozen bell and pimento peppers and they're now spread on on my largest baking sheets in the chest freezer. Tomorrow I'll move them all into jars for use over the winter. The biggest and nicest of the ripe peppers I used to make the stuffed bell peppers we had for supper tonight.

I think my carrots are finally starting to make their appearance. Or at least I think they're carrots. It's been so long since last I grew them I can't recall what their sprouts look like. I've got a few bare spots in the rows of greens that I'll have to resow. I think the sprinkler washed the seed a bit. Seeing more of the elephant garlic too though still have about have of it yet to break the surface.

Yet another weekend has come and gone.

.....Alan.