The thuds on the roof of our nursery office isn’t the hooves of eight reindeer, but instead is that of the roof height citrus trees planted nearby, dropping their newly ripened fruit. Here are two Citrus ‘Ichang Lemon’ fruit that dropped into my pocket on a recent garden walk.
Well aided by gravity, these dense, 4″ wide fruit, drop with quite a force, now that they’re finally ripe, long after our first freeze of 25 degrees F. With such a lovely, sweet-smelling fruit, every year our memory fades and we once again hold out the hope that they might have a good flavor, but alas, such is not the case. In fact, the extreme bitterness is so strong, it makes your face pucker like sucking on a bag of Sour Patch Kids. Our specimen is now 23 years old, and quite happy tormenting us with beautiful looking fruit.
We have calomondin oranges same bitterness /sourness. Try making marmalade using the juice, skin and flesh cut fine , pick out seeds hand use less sugar (about half?) than recommended by Ball. Pricewinner at the local county/state fair!