IF I COULD ONLY PLANT A FEW!
By: Ottillia J. Bier

Oranges
The navel orange dominates the winter into spring season. It's flavorful, easy to peel, and seedless.

Choose good old Washington navel orange (still the gold standard) or for novelty, try Cara Cara navel orange, a mutated Washington navel orange that produces pink-fleshed fruit.

Reserve the Valencia orange for summer harvest and juice. You may not have a choice of variety, but Midknight and Delta are seedless selections that are becoming very popular.

You may want to try a blood orange for novelty. Both the flesh and juice are red, like a raspberry. Moro is the most common variety and most highly colored, but Tarocco has the best flavor.

Mandarins (Tangerines)
Choose Seedless Kishu for very early season harvest. The golf ball size seedless fruits are tender, sweet and juicy. Very easy to peel; most everyone who tries it likes it.

Gold Nugget is my personal favorite. It matures in March and holds on the tree through the summer, if you can resist eating them all right away. It's seedless, easy to peel, with a rich, sweet flavor.

Grapefruit
Oroblanco is a grapefruit-pummelo hybrid that usually ripens in late December. It's white-fleshed, seedless, mild and sweet. No sugar needed. This is the grapefruit for people who don't like grapefruit.

Star Ruby grapefruit is the reddest of the red grapefruit if you insist on a red grapefruit, but its flavor is no where near as sweet as Oroblanco.

Cocktail “Grapefruit” is not a grapefruit at all; it is a hybrid of Siamese Sweet pummelo and Frua mandarin. The large yellow fruits are wonderfully sweet and very juicy. Cocktail has lots of seeds, but it is my first choice for juice from December to March.

Lemons and Limes
If you must have a lemon, choose the Variegated pink-fleshed Eureka lemon, sometimes sold under the name 'Pink Lemonade'. It is pretty with its marbled leaves, striped fruit, and pink flesh. No, it won't make pink lemonade, but it is a perfectly fine lemon.

If your taste runs more to the exotics, perhaps the Meyer lemon is for you. Meyer lemon is really a hybrid of lemon and orange. The tree tends to be small and quite attractive in the garden. The fruit has a smooth, yellow-orange rind and a distinctive aroma. It is not a perfect substitute for a lemon, but many people prefer its milder, less acidic juice.

Bearss lime is the conventional lime you find in the supermarket. It's seedless and a little more cold hardy than the Mexican (Key) lime. If you must have the Mexican lime, which is smaller, seedy, and more pungent in flavor, select the thornless Mexican lime. You won't be sorry; lime thorns are nasty.