Orange Season

In contrast to the olives, it's a good year for oranges. Our three trees (actually one orange and two tangerines) look just as they did when we first arrived here in February 2005 -- loaded with fruit heavy enough to break branches. This contrasts with last year, when there was almost no fruit at all.

This time around, we are determined to make the best use of the harvest that we can. Both the oranges and tangerines are of fine quality: large, juicy and sweet. But in fact, at this point in time, I can see we are going to be overwhelmed. Using all of the fruit would require almost industrial-scale equipment!

What actually can we do with it? Well of course drinking fresh orange juice whenever we want it is our favourite way of diminishing the citrus mountain. We really do have an almost endless supply, even considering that some of the fruit will happily stay on the trees until summer or later. In fact, at the present moment, we are picking up 5-10kg of fallers every day -- plenty for our juice needs! (We find it takes about 2kg of either the oranges or tangerines to make a litre of juice.) We've squeezed quite a lot of extra juice for freezing and will continue to do that -- until the freezer is full. I've been making marmalades of various types -- tangerine, orange, thick chunky batches, more refined jelly-like batches. But still we have piles of oranges around and we are fast running out of jam jars to preserve the marmalades in...

So if anyone has other ideas as to how we might use these fruit, do let us know. In particular if anyone knows anything about the manfacture of orange-based cleaners, we'd be very interested....