Days 123 - 136 The Clock Starts Ticking

I have known a colleague at work for many year now and all this time we have been talking about planting fruit trees at his house, particularly some kind of citrus. Well, it is citrus season now and he has missed the opportunity once again. If he had only planted those citrus trees when we first started talking about it, he could have been harvesting some beautiful citrus right now. This is a typical problem though...you think about it and say to yourself, "it will take so long to get any fruit if I plant a tree this year." Well, the clock starts ticking and time does pass. Three years is typical for the time between planting and first harvest and it may seem like a long time, but it really comes pretty quick. If you do not plant soon, you just delay the start of the clock. One of the first things I did when we moved into this house was to plant some citrus: an orange and two satsuma mandarins.

We have been enjoying the fruits of the two mandarin trees for over two weeks now. As I have said in past, fresh picked citrus is hard to beat and it surely cannot be replicated from store-bought citrus. Was at the local produce store yesterday and saw some organic mandarins...and you could tell that they had been harvested a while ago. The vim and vigor of the fruit had been lost...and they were still charging $3.50 per pound!! We have been harvesting between 5 - 10 mandarins a day over the past couple of weeks. Count them up. 90 mandarins and that does not include the ones that I do not know about as our kids harvest at will!!

Bees. I felt like I needed to shrink my hives down a level for winter and this was the weekend to do it. Warm weather!! Well, I took down the hives a box or two. Along with it came a harvest of about 2 gallons of honey. One of my hives is doing great, the other may not make it though the winter. Have to say that it is probably my fault because I did not set them up correctly when I picked them up this Spring. Did not have the time to spare at the time and of course when you do a poor job at something, you get poor results. Lesson learned.

Harvested over the past 2 weeks:

Day 123
1) 6 mandarins ($1.50)
2) 1 apple ($0.50)

Day 124
1) 7 mandarins ($1.75)
2) 2 apples ($1.00)

Day 125
1) 4 mandarins ($1.00)
2) 3 apples ($1.50)

Day 126
1) 8 mandarins ($2.00)

Day 127
1) 9 mandarins ($2.25)
2) 2 apples ($1.00)

Day 128
1) 7 mandarins ($1.75)

Day 129
1) 3 mandarins ($0.75)

Day 130
1) 11 mandarins ($2.75)

Day 131
1) 3 mandarins ($0.75)
2) 1 apple ($0.50)

Day 132
1) 3 mandarins ($0.75)
2) Two bunches chard ($6.00)
3) 1 apple ($0.50)

Day 133
1) 13 mandarins ($3.25)

Day 134
1) 3 mandarins ($0.75)

Day 135
1) 6 mandarins ($1.50)

Day 136
1) 6 mandarins ($1.50)
2) 7 quarts honey ($140.00)

Two-Week harvest: $33.00
Honey Harvested: 7 quarts ($140)

Total Produce Harvested (Year-to-Date): $816.50
Total Honey Harvested (Year-to-Date): $360.00
Expenses (Year-to-Date): $105.00