Local citrus

  "Is that a citrus tree?"
  Until we finally harvest the last of the fruit sometime in December or January, the evergreen "bush" laden with orange balls is hard to miss.  Visitors pulling up our driveway regularly point toward our front porch and ask.  
  It is a citrus, in fact, one called a satsuma, familiar to lots of casual backyard fruit growers in Louisiana and elsewhere near the Gulf Coast.  They are very similar to clementines/cuties, though a bit larger.  They're very easy to peel ("zipper skinned"), seedless, and a nice fresh eating fruit.

  This is a 10-year-old tree, planted against our south facing rock porch.  Harvests have gotten bigger as the tree has grown, of course, but the last few years we've had around 150-300 fruits each year.

  We're a bit too cold for satsumas, which means our satsuma needs to be kept warm when temperatures fall.  We're not sure how much cold the fruit can take so we cover it more often until we've harvested all the fruit, but the tree itself can survive temperatures in the mid-teens, so after the last of the fruit is harvested we only cover it any time the nighttime forecast shows any chance of teens or colder.  The coldest night we've had since we planted it it got down to right around 0 degrees.  We keep some water buckets next to the tree with the idea that they'll provide a temperature buffer as they gradually freeze, but we don't use any supplemental heat.  The blankets come off most days so it can get sunlight, but we're not sure how necessary that is.

It is really amazing to see the branches full of fruit.  The other great thing about the tree is the smell of the blossoms.

Both the interior and the exterior of the fruit are precious.  We always zest them before we eat them and then mostly let the zest dry out on a plate for later use.  We use the zest for ricotta pies, donuts, salad dressing... 

Until just a couple days ago (mid-January) we were just harvesting the fruits as we ate them, but with multiple nights in the forecast with lows in the teens we decided to go ahead and harvest the rest of them.  The eight of us have eaten one or two per person almost every day since about the beginning of December, and we filled a couple small tubs with our final harvest.  We're hoping we've figured out a way to keep them in cold storage for a few more weeks without drying out too much.  Then the only fresh fruit we'll have to eat until spring will be fuzzy (regular) kiwis (which have kept incredibly well for us in cold storage) until strawberries start to ripen in late April or early May.