Sage Gardens

Normally I take the winter off and let the gardens go wild. We don’t have bad winters here, but they can be very unpredictable. We’ll get rain and then some weather in the 60’s (high teens for those of you in Celcius-land), which causes everything thing to sprout, followed by several nights of frost which kills everything that just sprouted. And then the cycle repeats itself.

The one exception seems to be the citrus. The navel oranges ripen in late December and early January, the grapefruit, limes, tangerines and lemons shortly thereafter.

Navel Oranges ripen in December/January.

While we eat a lot of the fruit (especially the oranges and tangerines), the vast majority of it goes into our winter seasonal soaps, Fresh Orange, Zesty Grapefruit, and California Lemon. For each 40 pound batch of soap we’ll pick around 20 pounds of fresh fruit which results in about 2 pounds of dried and ground zest ultimately added to the soap.

Tangerines ripen in late January / early February

Unlike commercial citrus operations, we don’t pick all the fruit at once. We’ll leave it on the tree and pick it only as needed, which allows the fruit to stay fresh longer than it would if we tried to pick it all and store it. (Plus we really don’t have the room to store it, and leaving it in open bins would simply be a lunch invitation for all the critters.)

Grapefruit is ready by mid-February

By late April the trees will start to bloom and the gardens will be filled with the wonderful and heady scent of orange blossom. (You can usually smell them all the way up into the house.) At that point any fruit not already picked will start to drop off the tree, and if I don’t hurry, it all falls to the ground and I have to fight the ducks, chickens, raccoons, etc. for what usable fruit remains. I’ll dry and store as much as possible, which allows us to continue producing the citrus soap until mid-to-late June. Eventually, however, it’s all gone and that’s the end of the soap until the next season.

If you’d like to try the citrus soaps, you can find them all in the bath shop.