Chetwyn's June News

Published: Tue, 06/01/21

Summertime Citrus

Greetings ,

Summer is here at Chetwyn! The weather is mild, the skies are blue, and the hills surrounding our farm have turned a beautiful gold. The combination of cool foggy mornings and warm afternoons makes perfect weather for our trees.

Lemons on Lemons

Avocados have seasons and harvest times, but our little citrus grove is busy making lemons and limes all year round. They often have blossoms, baby fruit, and ripe fruit on the tree at the same time, which makes it so we can harvest citrus throughout the year.

At Chetwyn we are growing three varieties of lemon: Lisbon, Meyer and Pink-Variegated.

The Lisbon is the typical lemon. It looks bright yellow when mature, with a particularly juicy and acidic taste. They often contain few to no seeds.

A Meyer lemon is a cross between a lemon and a mandarin orange. It has a thin, edible peel, a lot of juice, and tastes a bit sweeter than the typical lemon.

Our Pink-Variegated lemon is tart like a Lisbon, but looks very different. The peel is often stripped with green and yellow and has a beautiful light pink color inside.

You can also visit our website to see more about the lemons we grow.

Lemons to Replace Salt?

An interesting tip we learned from S'alternative (a project by Sunkist to find salt alternatives) is that lemons can be a tasty replacement for salt in nearly any dish, which improves flavor and reduces sodium.

Here is a helpful chart to put that information to use:

Reduces

For: Replace: With: sodium by:

Vegetables 1 tsp salt 1/4 tsp salt + 1/2 tsp zest + 2 1/2 tsp juice 75%

Pork 1 tsp salt 1/2 tsp salt + 1 tsp zest + 5 tsp juice 50%

Fish 1 tsp salt 1/2 tsp salt + 1 tsp zest + 5 tsp juice 50%

Dressing 1 tsp salt 1/2 tsp salt + 1 tsp zest + 5 tsp juice 50%

Grain 1 tsp salt 2/3 tsp salt + 1 1/3 tsp zest + 2 2/3 tsp juice 30%

Soups 1 tsp salt 2/3 tsp salt + 1 1/3 tsp zest + 2 2/3 tsp juice 30%

Beef 1 tsp salt 2/3 tsp salt + 1 1/3 tsp zest 30%

Chicken 1 tsp salt 2/3 tsp salt + 1 1/3 tsp zest 30%

You can find original information here. They have some great ideas in there!

New Things at the Market

We are now starting to finish up our spring varieties of avocados and we will be moving onto our summer crops.

We have another week or so with our spring avocados, then we will be selling Hass avocados later this month. This is a dark skin avocado with high oil content, which means creamy avocados that can easily be scooped from the skin. Some fun facts: the first Hass tree was grown in the early 1920's by A.R. Rideout in La Habra Heights, California. He sold the seedling to Rudolph Hass, who patented the fruit in 1935. This original "Mother Hass" tree produced fruit for 80 years and is the origin for millions of avocado trees, even the trees that we have on our farm.

In addition to avocados, we will bring lemons to our stand every week. This will include some combination of Lisbon, Meyer, and/or Pink-Variegated lemons. We hope to see you at the market!

Baby Avocados

The bloom is over for our Mexicola avocado trees, and they have moved onto their next stage of production: Setting their fruit. The fruit on these trees are about the size of a pea. We love wandering through the grove and seeing these tiny avocados pop up. There are a lot of them, thanks to all our great pollinators.

Avocados take their time coming to maturity. This new generation of fruit won’t be ready to go to market until mid-winter. Our Spring varieties--which we have almost finished picking for this season--will soon show babies that will be ready next spring. Our winter avocado varieties are just starting to bloom, and their fruit will be harvested in the following winter.