Harvest time

January 6, 2012

Head Lemon Inspector reporting for duty

The crop

Inspecting

A more thorough inspection

Consider this crop inspected

Nang mentioned from time to time for years that he wanted a lemon tree, so for one birthday, I bought him a tree, planted it in a great pot, and thought he would take over from there. Little did I know that he didn't actually want a tree, he simply wanted to make lemonade from homegrown lemons. I never caught the weeding, and planting, and tending bug that my parents had, but I begrudgingly took over caring for his lemon tree. I monitor the weather and wrap the tree in quilts when it freezes, keep track of the fertilization and watering schedule, and suffer when all of the blooms turn into baby lemons, and then disappear mysteriously one day. So when "we" finally grew some lemons (for which Nang was not as ecstatic as I think he should have been), I decided that William and I could harvest them on our own. William was pretty interested in picking the orange-apples (said quickly as one word to describe any fruit other than a banana), but after they came off the tree, he was pretty sure that they were just balls grown for his amusement.