Poverty Bay is known for great citrus so we’re lucky to have access to plenty of mandarins, oranges, tangelos, lemons & limes.  We have an overgrown tangelo tree out in the back yard – the fruit isn’t fully ripe until early Spring but we begin juicing them as soon as they are a decent size.  They’re quite sour but nothing a little honey won’t fix.  We also have oranges, mandarins, lemons, limes and grapefruit in various stages of production.

Our most recent additions to the back yard orchard are two easy-peel mandarins.  We planted a Silverhill & a Richard’s Special about 8-9 years ago and these produce plenty of very sweet flavoursome fruit.  However they are not easy to peel and they are very very seedy.  I end up buying bucket loads of the easy-peel seedless mandarins for school lunches so this year we decided to add two of these trees to our citrus bonanza (one is a Kawano and the other, well it’s too cold to go outside to check the label – I am sure there’s snow on the hills….brrrr). Continue reading →