Fruit Trees!

I’ve been impatient to plant fruit trees ever since we bought the Tucson house in September of last year. I have always wanted citrus trees, as part of my lifelong dream of having a Mediterranean garden. We had been delaying planting trees because we want to do some repaving and extending courtyard walls, and we don’t want new trees in the way. Also we are frequently gone and we didn’t have irrigation for them.

At the beginning of July, shortly before leaving on our big west coast van trip, John went to a hardware store for some last-minute fix-it item and came back with several big, heavy patio pots.

We set them along the wall near the pool and left on our trip. When we returned nearly a month later, there they were, sitting in the rain by our muddy pool, empty and beckoning.

John and I aren’t ones to leave empty pots empty for very long. And we realized they could solve our fruit tree dilemma. These pots, although heavy, can be moved. If we planted our fruit trees in them, we could move them out of the way when we finally got around to repaving and extending the courtyard wall.

We were due to leave again in two days for Albuquerque, and we would be gone for another two weeks. Did we have time to put something in these pots? John would need to run drip irrigation to them (despite record rains, it’s still the desert).

We went to Mesquite Valley Growers, which turns out to be an absolutely awesome, enormous nursery. We were standing, helpless and bewildered, among acres of fruit tree saplings, when a wise, no-nonsense elderly employee named Jody showed up with a go-cart and told us to hop in. She took us on a fact-filled tour of the premises and we have never had such a great tour in our life!

Jody assured us that fruit trees did fine in pots, and we could always plant them in the ground in a few years if needed. That’s what we wanted to hear! She showed us dozens of kinds of citrus and helped us pick out a few.

In the end, we bought a key lime, a finger lime, a tangerine and an orange. I also want a lemon and a grapefruit, which Jody says will be available in September (they were sold out, but they grow their own trees and she knew the next batch would be available soon).

Here’s John getting ready to plant our new citrus trees! (Or – citrus bushes to be more accurate).

The finger lime is the strangest. The limes aren’t round, they are pod-shaped.

The insides of a finger lime are little round beads, like caviar, except pale green in color. According to John, YouTube says you’re supposed to slice them in half the short way, and squeeze out the round beads. But I suppose you can do whatever you’d normally do with a lime. Which in my case, isn’t much, but I still love to have them because they smell so good.

The finger lime tree is not the best looking tree. The leaves are very small (well suited for the desert). And it’s more of a scraggly bush than a tree, even though it can get quite large in a hedge-like way. It also has thorns. But we still thought it was cool.

The Mexican lime, which is a local term for a specific type of key lime, already has a lot of limes on it. The orange and tangerine don’t yet.

John managed to get everything planted and onto drip lines before we left for Albuquerque. Yay, citrus trees!

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