Spring Cleaning Outside.

Pink Grapefruit

 Spring is here in NE Florida. For the past few weeks we have enjoyed the citrus form my various trees but yesterday I decided I needed to do a major spring cleaning of the trees and remove any remaining fruit.



Any of you with fruit trees know you usually have  to resort to throwing the fruit at cars to get rid of it all but I decided to make some juice.




 As I was picking the Grape fruit I noticed the Spanish Moss has taken up in the tree, funny how I never paid attention before now.

Valencia Orange

 I started out to make a few gallons of juice so I would pick a bucket and squeeze them.



From past experience I like to mix the grapefruit juice with orange juice even though the grapefruit was very sweet this year it just makes a really nice drink.





I set up production under the tree as it was cool outside and the mess is easy to clean up.









 Here is some grapefruit ready for the juicer.
I use an old juicer pictured here it is fairly easy to use and seems to do a fair job. Some pulp passes through the juicer which is just the way I like it.

 This wheelbarrow full of squeezed fruit  produced about 10 gallons of juice.All this and more was added to my compost pile.







Shown here is some of the Juice ready for the freezer. I like to use the Arizona Tea jugs as they are very heavy duty, you have to leave an air gap for expansion in the freezer.  This is a 50-50 mix of orange and grapefruit, all told I ended up with almost 14 gallons.
Nothing beats fresh squeezed.


 I am glad to get the fruit off the trees.




PS, Any of you reading this to please don't mention this post to my friend Stephen, he will be over here begging for a jug.