Patty: I cannot eat even 10% of the fruit I grow. That is why I make a lot of juice. Wekiwa is a fantastic fruit for citrus juice blends. It also gets sweet before most other citrus in this area. Blend #1, grapefruit juice of your choice + enough Wekiwa to make it sweet. Or use Minneola instead of G.F. Blend #2 (juice about equal ammounts of each) Page + Clementine + Nova/Fairchild + Fortune + Wekiwa. This blend of flavors is like so; rich + aromatic + balanced-sweet + tart + Wekiwa (smoothing them togeather). Fortune is the wild card here. Some years it is tart like a Minneola, others it is more like Nova. For aromatic, substitute any Clemintine or Ponkan group. For balanced-sweet, use any other ClemxOrlando hybrid (Bower,Robinson,Lee,Etc.)except Bell (unless Bell is very ripe it is more tart). Another balanced-sweet group is the KingxMediterranian hybrids like Kinnow. If you don't have Wekiwa use Satsumas or round oranges. Be creative, blood oranges and red navels also work instead of adding the tart component, adding a new level of complexity (berry flavor instead of citric acid ). Patty, it looks like you are almost there. Five years from now, when each tree is loaded with fruit, you will be so happy to make all the blends you can dream up.

Great info - thanks, Patty. The Citrus Grower's Forum has a bunch of detailed posts and seems more dedicated to Citrus. Exactly what I was looking for. The Citrus ID is letting me ID my own. I had already found the UCR citrus variety stuff as my brother works there and I thought of it pretty quickly. It wasn't getting me very far with very little detail or way too detailed info. I had been told the "Tangelos", now tentatively ID as Minneola were the original grove. I plotted a grid and used surveying equipment to plot trees in other yards nearby and can see it is the Navels that are in an exact grid with vineyard type spacing. As large as mine are, I found another with a 20" diameter trunk on an exact east-west line with mine so I have to assume they are 50+ years old. The Minneolas are much bigger than my friends 27 year old orange grove so it was hard to tell. I suppose I am getting carried away by trying to make it the way it was originally. This means I need to save the struggling Navel that was completely overgrown with ivy and one-step-from-dead since it was one of the original trees. I've got one other 20' diameter Navel producing its first decent crop of small so-so fruit and two other 20' diameter Navels producing huge quantities of fabulous fruit. I figured out the Lemons seem to be Rough Lemon and are supposed to look ugly. They make great lemonade.

I like the Four Winds trees. They are very hardy! If I do end up getting a blood orange, that is where it will come from. I ordered my lemons over the internet and they came via UPS but this past spring I saw some for sale at a local nursery. Next year (I'm not buying any trees this late in the year) I will check there first before ordering over the internet and paying the huge shipping charge. "Your trees look absolutely amazing through it all." Thank you very much! :D I checked your link - yours are beautiful. I wish I could have that many, but space constrains me. I gave all mine (except the tangelo) a seaweed spray today, and as soon as my predator mites have had a chance to do their thing in the yard, I will start with the FE. How do I dilute the FE, by the way? "I can't beleive that your meyer is so resilient..That is encourageing for me anyway." It is ridiculously tough. When it had foot rot, I stopped watering it entirely and let it dry out for a MONTH. Then I gave it a good soak and then let it go another MONTH without water. Halfway through the second month, the sores started to dry up, so I think that's when the fungus deceased. I am still, however, to this day very careful about transferring anything from that plant to others. It's always the last one I check with the water meter, for instance, and then I wipe the meter down with alcohol before I put it away. The following winter it suffered spider mite attack. The winter after that it dropped almost all its leaves because it was, unbeknownst to me, in a draft during the day. I moved it as soon as I figured out the problem, but too late! Then this last winter was the Alternaria. Yet it lives. It has a strong survival instinct. It is my favorite tree, despite having never given me a single lemon. I think all the adversity it's faced is what has given it that nice tree-shape in such a small format. "I stuck it outside by March, and this is what it looks like now..;-)" That's the one you had labeled as being almost destroyed by thirp and scale? It is gorgeous! :D I think the Meyer lemons are made of titanium. By way of contrast, if I do even the slightest thing wrong with the tangelo (move from outside to inside too fast, or vice versa too fast, not enough humidity, too much humidity, not enough light, even the tiniest hint of a draft) it drops a ton of leaves. It is a big crybaby, but at least its temperamentality has taught me a lot about what citrus don't like. I have heard that blood oranges are very persnickity trees, but I think I'm ready to tackle one. "You are doing a great job with yours, and it is nice to meet you." Nice to meet you, too! "I like how you made wintering them sound easier than most think they are." It would be totally easy if not for the tangelo, which whines and cries and takes up a huge amount of space. We are going to screw some hooks into the ceiling next month, the kind you use for hanging plants, and suspend a shop light from them, and I think that will solve all my light problems for a good long time.

Since my navel tree is in bloom also, here's a story: A gardener's wife named Louise, Wanted some oranges to squeeze, Juice she would make, And make no mistake, Louise could squeeze to please. So the gardener picked a bushel of fruit, And added some instructions to boot, "Make sure you get all the seeds, and take out the pulp for my needs. And I would be really thrilled, if my juice could be iced, not just chilled." Well, the medics arrived not in time, They found the gardener supine, Nose and mouth filled with seeds, Pulp covered him like weeds, And ice had crushed his spine. The moral to this story is clear, If you want to hold your spouse dear, When accepting the favors, Of her many labors, Say "thanks" and shut up, ya' hear.