Marmalade

It's a pretty great thing to have mature fruit trees around, though with the hustle of the seasonal garden we often forget about them.

This is especially true of the oranges. There are 6-7 orange trees here on the property we rent. Why 6-7? Well that discrepancy depends on what you call a tree. There is one here that was just full of dead branches when we moved in. I trimmed it pretty hard, because I figured it was a lost cause and was preparing to cut it out entirely, but the battery on the chain saw died out before I could get to the main trunk. Before I got back to the job, it suddenly sprouted a whole bunch of pretty vigorous suckers- so we've decided to give it a chance. I know that might sound foolish to some people, but one of the best producing trees here is nothing but a HUGE stump (biggest around I've seen on an orange) that has a big, round, tangled mass of suckers coming out of the top of it. The oranges it produces are quite small and stay pretty sour, but in my opinion they make for perfect juice and the quantity is best of all the trees. This tree is the very one that got me fired up to make marmalade today.

Since it grows pretty close to the hedge that blocks us from the street, I couldn't help but notice it when I was walking around the hedge chasing a lizard. And what I noticed was this: All the (30 or so) 'oranges' on it were empty shells hanging like so many dried out old Christmas ornaments. There were no oranges on this tree at all anymore, just some old hard peels still attached to their twigs.

So I got to googlin'. It sounds like this is the work of 'roof rats', aka- black rats. I don't find this hard to believe at all, because we sure do have them. We have been in a sort of truce for most of the past year, with the exception of the compost bin incident, and the crawl space incident (the only time I have resorted to poison). This certainly means war.

First thing is to pick all the oranges, from all the trees. Well, all but one anyway- I'm leaving the tall one in the driveway to let them get REALLY sweet. But what shall I do with all these oranges?


We turned to Fine Preserving, a book which I bought long ago simply because I thought it was written by MFK Fisher. It wasn't, it was written by Catherine Plagemann- but the copy I bought was a reprint and annotated by MFK Fisher. Anyway, it was a happy accident, cause that book is full of recipes for strange and forgotten preservations that I'd never heard of before. I've been hoping to get to this book eventually (making something from it that is) but I haven't done anything but read from it till now.


So, here we were staring at all these oranges and wondering whether to juice them or eat them, donate them, try and barter them or what- when we thought of marmalade. Not only does this book have a great recipe for orange marmalade (it actually has two), but it also contains one for every other citrus fruit you can think of (OK, not starfruit). The one we chose uses both lemons and oranges.

A few hours of peeling, chopping, cooking and jarring later- and we've got some oranges tucked away where the rats can't get to them, in the form of about a gallon of marmalade. It's pretty good too, though I'm really supposed to wait a week for best taste.

Here come the pictures..