We grow Meyer lemons: they are big, juicy, tasty and frost resistant. They are ripe in February. Here is how we preserve and use them till next year’s harvest. All parts of the lemon are used: zest, peel, flesh, juice. 70 meyer lemons cover us for a year, they weigh over half a pound each. The potted tree produces between 50 and a 100.

Our plums are starting to ripen, and all at once. Here is how we process the ones we dont eat directly from the tree or give away. We added a Japanese plum wine recipe here and published a separate recipe for Amish plum wine.You can grow plum trees from ripe pits: scrub the pits, put in bowl of water, discard the floating ones, plant three pits in one planter hole in a large cloth planter pot with handles or in a planter bed in a sunny location.Plant in fall, they need winter cold to germinate. They will sprout in spring. Select the most vigorous one, remove other two.Drag planter pot around till you find a sunny location where the young plum tree flourishes.#GlobalApron

Mozambi limes give twice as much juice per lime as Key limes, and are just as astringent.The zest is yellow, not green, and the flavor is excellent. We use the Mozambi Lime juice to make wine margeritas, and make Pie.The dried leaves of the shrub make a delicious cooking ingredient, used around the world as Makrut leaves, also called Peroek leaves, or the derogatory Kaffir leaves.

The first ripe blood oranges are falling off the tree, time to enjoy these fresh wonderfull fruits and process the peels. We also preserve peeled blood orange segments in light honey syrup to add to salads. Here are the recipes for our fresh juice and peel preservation methods.

Before the first night frost comes in November, time to process all the garden tomatoes, ripe or not. A pound of tomatoes make a pint of puree. A tablespoon of apple cider vinegar per pint keeps botulism out. The green tomatoes take longer to peel, then are cored, roasted, pureed and simmered. The red hard ones and red ripe soft ones are peeled, cored, pureed, then roasted and simmered. The over ripe ones are washed, quartered and sundried and stored in olive oil. We expect the next tomato harvest in June, 32 weeks from now, so I freeze 64 pints of puree, the basis for tomato soup, tomato sauces, tomato paste, salsa verde, and ketchup. They take little space in the freezer when stored in quart bags laid flat and frozen.

Lemongrass makes a sturdy year round indoor kitchen window herb for fresh cooking. Two plants grow faster than our annual herbal needs. We harvest and dry the yellow tips and use the green parts. The fresh leaves can be shredded in your coffee grinder to use as lemon grass spice in stir fries. We also extract citronella oil the slow and lazy way by sticking dried lemon grass stalks in a bottle of neutral tasting grape seed oil, to fry with.When grown outdoors in pots, one Egyptian Lemon grass plant contains enough citronella oil to make a citronella candle that repels mosquitos and flies on the porch outside. We extract the oil simply by wet steaming the grass stalks in a cast iron pan with a glass bowl, cool till oil is solid and mix with beeswax pellets, then melt. A pound of lemon grass makes a teaspoon of citronella oil. A teaspoon of oil makes a one pound candle, enough for a year.We have grown the same two plants for fifteen years now. Once a year, we split the plants, grow indoors over winter, plant one or two outside in spring.#GoldenApron23

I do not cut our dead roses from our rose bushes in the fall, they develop rose hip fruits. Great for making rose hip tea, rose hip syrup and rose hip jam.Rosehips turn dark when drying in the sun, like raisins.Three 8 foot high climbing Californica rose bushes and one climbing Rosa Rugosa bush produce about three pounds of dried rose hips annually. The birds in the garden collect the difficult to get to hips when ripe, I pick the easy ones. You can also order dried rosehips on Amazon to make your own tea.

Rhubarb is ready and must all be harvested before summer, or it gets woody here in California. We make pint jars of rhubarb compote and freeze them to use for year round desserts. Also delicious rhubarb strawberry pies that freeze well. And drink fresh rhubarb juice. And save rhubarb syrup.And we make a very refreshing rhubarb wine, an Amish Farm tradition I learned working in Iowa. Called Piestengel wine, pie stalk wine.#CA2025

Mozarella is made by boiling and stretching freshly made cheese curds to make an elastic firm cheese, perfect for slicing and melting on pizzas.This recipe uses the rennet in a slice of frozen leftover mozarella, fresh lemon juice, vinegar, himalayan rock salt and whole milk to make the next batch of fresh mozarella. Freeze slice of mozarella for next batch of mozarella, stays fresh up to six months.

This is a delicious fruit salad posted by cookpad member Lissy Art. I cut her recipe in half and made two half salads using different quantities of red hot chili peppers in each half. I prefer the milder one, and I am posting it here so I can make it more often. Thank you Lissy.#springfeast

Granny Smith apples are our horses’ favorite apples, and ours. They stay fresh a long time, dry well, make good apple sauce, great apple strudel, apple pie, apple donuts, apple beignets and apple “flaps”. The Granny Smith apples we use are medium size apples, 3 apples per pound. One to two apple trees produce several hundred apples, enough for all recipes below.

Tomato lemon marmelade, fresh and tangy . Picked at the peak of tomato sweetness, preserved safely with the acid of lemons and sugar and a five minute waterbath. We use it year round on cheeseburgers, with cheese and crackers, on french bread as luncheon, on omelettes and in scrambled eggs, on french fries and hot dogs instead of ketchup. Use a teaspoon when you need a slice of tomato.