Do You Smell That?

Each morning I am now greeted by Meyer lemon blossom smells. The tiny deformed tree is now covered with fragrant hope. I looked for an older photo that I had posted on this plant and could not find it. It was a sad sack for sure.

The tree was about a foot and a half high and is not much higher now.  Back then it had about a dozen leaves on it and 5 or six mostly bare branches. I transplanted it and fertilized it and left it out on the sunny deck keeping it watered. Because our climate gets possible first freezes in November I brought it inside and bought some grow lights and kept it near a sunny window and kept it watered and fertilized. It rewarded me with the hundreds of blossoms above. These will mostly fall and not set even though they might have tiny balls of pretend fruit at the back end of the blossom. The tree is just too small to support much fruit.

The blossoms do start with a lovely exotic fragrance. But as many are fading the smell flagrance can be a bit overwhelming and begins to take on a more fermented odor. It is starting to fill the kitchen air and overpower the lamb chops I am cooking.

Above is my citrus grove in the corner of my kitchen. The tall tree to the back is a kaffir lime. It does not produce much fruit but since I cook with the leaves in Thai food it is just what we want. The middle is the calamondin orange which is really sour like a lime or lemon but with an orange flavor.  It can produce twice a year sometimes.   And while they have lots of seeds and are small, they are fresher than anything we can buy at this time of year.  We pick them off the tree and use them in drinks or squeeze over fish or on salad throughout the winter.  If there are some leftover I make a calamondin cake. The small tree to the front is my Meyer lemon which is full of blossoms now. The grow lights which we purchased this year and that are on a timer made a big difference in the mite disease problem we used to have and the leaf drop due to lack of light.