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November means more than just cooler temperatures and approaching holidays. It's the opening of the citrus fruit season.
Thursday, November 01, 2007
By Judy Walker

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For several years, my family lived in a neighborhood that used to be a citrus grove. Our yard had a half-dozen orange trees, and the scent of orange blossoms laid a permanent spell of enchantment on me. I adore citrus of all types and stripes.

A chef taught me how to peel and section the fruit with a knife. It's easy. We ate orange sections in salads, we poached chicken breasts and pork chops in the juice, and we made salsa for Thanksgiving with oranges, jalapeno and cranberries.

When I moved my electric citrus reamer to Louisiana, there was something new to love that first fall: the satsuma, a seedless, thornless mandarin. I was thrilled to find Key limes in relative abundance at supermarkets. At my neighborhood nursery, I bought a dwarf Meyer lemon tree, which survived the 2005 flood -- even though the nursery didn't.

November, for me, is not just cooler temperatures and approaching holidays. It's when I want to celebrate the beginning of citrus season. This year, I couldn't wait to see what was happening in Plaquemines Parish, where the rich black silt famously flavors the citrus fruit and Creole tomatoes grown in it for generations.

On my trip there last Thursday, I found Sandy Becnel Palmer standing with a clipboard outside her Stixs-n-Stems fruit stand and nursery at 14085 Hwy. 23, 11 miles south of the Belle Chasse Naval Air Station. Locally grown trees in 19 citrus types were being unloaded to sell when she opened the next day for the season.

Her stand has been at this location for 49 years, and she just bought land across from the entrance of the naval base to open a larger, year-round location.

"This all used to be fruit stands when I was a kid," Palmer said. "From Myrtle Grove down, they lost every tree" to Katrina.

Fruit stands are fewer now and far between, but there is still a lot of citrus. And the stands also sell a variety of vegetables, pumpkins, jams and more. Palmer sells lots of peanuts boiled in crab boil, too.

Her satsumas and lemons were being picked as we spoke. The navels, Louisiana sweet oranges and grapefruit will ripen next.

Last year, Palmer saw an increase in the number of New Orleans residents buying citrus trees -- perhaps because Katrina felled other types of trees that had kept their yards from receiving the full sunlight that fruit trees require.

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