My mum always jokes that if you throw a rotten tomato into the garden in Cyprus, months later, you would have a tomato plant. The soil here is incredibly fertile. Fruit and vegetables grow in abundance and taste divine.
Winter is citrus season and we are fortunate to have some trees in the garden.
The harvest is grapefruit, clementine, mandarin, orange, lime and pomelo.
I was looking forward to a little fruit. A little fruit? I’m fond of understatement, but holy moly…what a harvest!
So much fruit, I’ve never seen. There is something very special about walking down the garden in the morning and picking breakfast from the tree.
The huge yellow things in the title picture are Pomelos. I now know,(thank you, Google), that the Pomelo pre-dates the Grapefruit, which is a hybrid of it and the orange. It’s a curious fruit. The bright yellow skin promises a super-grapefruit. Cut open, the fruit presents as a pale grapefruit wrapped in papier-mâché and a yellow leather jacket. The size comes from the protection that the fruit wears.
The papier-mâché, more properly called pith, is tough and as well as encasing the fruit, it acts as a skeleton. The flesh, which is the fruit, is lovely and sweet.
That said, its best not to be too hungry when choosing a pomelo for breakfast. Getting to that sweet flesh is hard work and the rewards seems scant in proportion to the effort.
Marmalade
However, it is alleged that one can make marmalade from pomelo, so even as I type, Mrs L is doing battle with pomelos.
Meanwhile, I’m having a grapefruit every morning and as many mandarins and clementines as I can. Visit the house in winter and you get force-fed citrus fruit.
In between writing and editing this post, Mags presented us with an honest to goodness, absolutely authentic, damn tasty, pomelo marmalade. My type of harvest.
Fame and fortune awaits!
