I have been looking at Satsumas and other citrus to grow in a container in my area of Oregon's Willamette Valley - we are on the "warm side" and I can offer protection and even greenhouse for at least a few plants, but am hoping for hardy to high teens. But I want fruit no one else does - as a diabetic, oranges are typically too sweet for me to eat - I make marmalade and juice from sour oranges - I love Sevilles but they are not cold hardy. It's not easy to find out which mandarins, etc., orange-tasting fruit are highly flavored but at least mildly tart. Flavorful is important - insipid won't do. Tart, sweet-tart, tangy and flavorful is what I am looking for. I use xylitol for a sweetener and it makes fantastic juice and marmalade. On another line, I am interested in budding different varieties onto a rootstock. I have seeds for Flying Dragon - should I start one and bud onto that? Does the rootstock affect the cold-hardiness? How does that work? I have not done bud grafting before (tho am tempted to do a little with my micro pinot noir vineyard). Joe Real, maybe you can give me a pointer on this. Your multi-plants sound awesome. Thanks - love to read the citrus talk! Thea

Well, what I finally tried... I boiled the peels in water with a little baking soda (now I'm not certain I should have used the baking soda but I noticed that many marmalade or kumquat recipes say to use it for the first soak in hot water so I tried. Anyone know what the baking soda is for in some of the recipes?) Anyway, I boiled the skins a bit and then drained and cooled them so I could use a spoon to scoop out more of the bitter white stuff. Do this very gently as the skins are more fragile after cooking for a little while. I didn't time this very closely but a few minutes or so seems to work. So, I scraped out as much of the white pith as I could. With our dancy tangerines there isn't very much white stuff but when I tested the first peal without removing the white stuff it had a really strong bitter aftertaste. After cleaning the cooked peel cups I then boiled them gently in simple syrup. I didn't really time in. I just kept an eye on them and removed them when they started becoming a little transparent. I let them drain. They are tricky to handle as they like to stack themselves up in the boiling syrup. After they drain a bit or loose some of their stickiness, I shook them in a ziplock bag with some sugar and placed them in the dehydrator on the top rack with a tall dome lid to allow enough space for them. They are cute little cups, Now I need to figure out what to do with them. I made some tangerine marmalade (just a really small batch, two full 12 oz jars processed and one partial jar I'm taste testing as I write.) Tasty. I think I need to test my candy thermometer though as this stuff has jelled up very well even though the thermometer never got up to the temp that I read is needed for our altitude. We are at less than 500 feet above sea level so I would expect the appropriate temp to be over 215 F right? Anyway, it still seemed to work and I like the taste so all is well that ends well huh?

OK, did it. DH helped me peel (fast work) & de-vein (slow work!) on Saturday night, and I canned yesterday. I am grateful to Sharon for posting the NCFHP link b/c it gave instructions only for raw pack for BWB, so I took that to be a hint and did not heat them in syrup, which I otherwise would have done (since that's how I do other fruits). They held their shape well, but if I'd cooked them first I suspect I'd have gotten mush as in my first sad canning attempt. I made light syrup with half local honey (nothing fancy, but a definite step up from Billy Bee). You can taste the honey in the syrup so I would recommend that. I canned - some plain - some with pineapple (thanks to jim's recommendation; the one I was able to get that was ripe wasn't real sweet or flavourful, but the hope was to get some of its "tang" --- the clementines were an especially sweet, flavourful batch) - some with dried cranberries (the store-bougth sweetened "craisin" kind; I couldn't find any fresh) Then I froze - some in sections on a tray, packing into a bag when they were hard, as I do with berries - some in small containers with honey syrup This a.m. we tried one of the plain canned jars. As mentioned, the texture was better than I'd feared --- soft and squishy, of course, but so is all canned fruit in my experience. If anyting, closer in texture to fresh clementines than, say, canned pears are to fresh pears. The flavour was OK, but definitely toned WAY down an without, as had been suggested, much of the "zing" of citrus. I wish I'd thought to put in a bit of lemon juice as I think it could have helped. Our though was that it was not remotely like eating fresh clemetines, but worth doing in order to be able to open a jar and add to fruit salad in the summer & fall, when we have fresh fruits of other kind and the imported citrus is at its most expensive and least flavourful. Same as we do to peaches and pears, in order to open and add to fruit salad in the winter with the freshly-truckd-up-from-Florida citrus. Will try the other variations and report back; looking forward to Kim's reports, too! To use the frozen ones for our purposes, which mainly involve breakfast, will mean a bit more organization (taking a container out of the freezer the night before); remains to be seen if we can manage it! ;-) Z P.S> thanks again for everyone's comments and advice etc. I really appreciate it!

I always scrub any citrus fruit I make marmelade out of, with hot soapy water. Don't know if that gets off much of the pesticide residue, but rinsing with water will not work since the pesticides are oil based. Soaking in a 5% salt solution may help too. But don't kid yourselves about the rind of citrus fruits, they drench them with pesticides. Clementines make marvelous marmelade, so if you don't make it, now would be a fantastic time to start. Homeade is well worth the trouble. Throw in a vanilla bean or a hunk of ginger to the stuff as you are cooking it for an extra special zip. Take out before jarring up. Here's a great orange tea loaf I make which also calls for grinding up the whole fruit in a food processor. Take out the seeds (pips!) first. This loaf freezes well and makes a nice holiday gift. Great spread with cream cheese for breakfast. Seems kinda weird to grind up the whole orange, but trust me, it is good. This got "best of" one year on this forum. Don't know about the pesticide issue though, you'll have to weigh in on it based on what you know about your fruit and risk tolerance level. Orange Loaf 1 orange, unpeeled 6 oz. pitted dates orange juice 1/2 cup hot water 2 TBLSP butter 1 egg 2 cups flour 1 cup sugar 1 tsp. baking powder 3/4 tsp. salt (I'd use less if I soaked the fruit in a salt water solution) 1/2 tsp. baking soda 3/4 cup walnuts Combine orange and dates in a blender or food processor, process until firmly ground. Drain juice off of this mixture and combine with enough extra orange juice to make 1/2 cup. In a saucepan, heat the orange juice, water and butter until the butter melts. When this mixture cools, add the egg and date/orange slurry. Combine this with the dry ingredients. Bake in a 9x5x3 inch greased loaf pan for 1 hour. Recipe easily doubled. And if you're prone to excess, could add some raisins or dried cranberries too. The way I bake, I routinely sub half whole wheat flour, 3/4 cup sugar for 1 cup, and use two egg whites instead of 1 whole egg. These tweaks make for less fat and calories and more nutrition, but the bread doesn't keep as long.