Although our main annual crop on the farm is mangoes, we do strive towards a more sustainable lifestyle, and over the years and as an ongoing effort we have been planting a great deal of organic fruits and vegetables, and given the fact that we had our first sustainable rains in quite a few years - I must say that the yield on the recent produce has honestly exceeded all expectations. and within the next few weeks I will have my hands full with various harvests, as well as processing the excess foods for storage.
As you can see here the naartjies or tangerines as some might call them, are hanging heavy in the trees and we have already had a few fruit that ripened early to taste test - and so far it seems like it will be a great tasting year for them.
Here tangerines are the first of many citrus varieties of the year, and much like their counterparts that fruit in the winter time, they are great for keeping the immune system up and running with their high vitamin C content.
"Like all citrus fruits, tangerines have an abundance of vitamin C. They also have a moderate amount of vitamin A, with 100 grams of tangerine providing you with approximately 14% of your daily recommended vitamin A intake.
There are also reported health benefits to eating tangerine peels. The peel contains a super-flavonoid, or antioxidant, called tangeretin. Super-flavonoids have shown promise in studies as an effective way to lower cholesterol. " ~ source
And I am hoping that this years harvest will allow me not only to have some delicious fruits to put on the table and share with family and friend, but also have some spare to make some cordial and marmalade with that will last throughout the year. (and of course some of these will be up for sale at the farmers market.)
Another fruit tree that is looking very promising this year is the Guava tree.
This trees branches are hanging low under the weight of the fruit that it is baring.
And this tree is amazing for various reasons not only does it make delicious fruits that are high in nutritional value, but the leaves of the tree as well as the skins of the fruit can also be used medicinally.
If you would like to read up a bit more on the nutritional benefits as well as the medicinal applications of this wonderful fruit - you can click on this link here
As far as the fruit itself goes, they not only make for wonderful eating, but is great to make jellies and juices with as well, and my personal favorite of course is canned guava halves - this is divine for eating with ice-cream or cream on a hot summers day, and I am looking forward to bottling some for the family - as well as the market.
But it is not only the trees that are baring fruit - my berries are also making a run for it. This is a picture of one of the gooseberry plants that I planted a few moths back and brought with me from Durban. It has started making its first berries recently and I have already planted out the seeds from the first berries I harvested from it.
These berries will come in handy when frozen for making deserts or smoothies, but they are also wonderful and nutritional to eat fresh. Gooseberry jam, although not one of my personal favorites is a great seller and makes for a lovely gift - so I will definitely try to make some of that if I have any fruit spare.
The one thing that I have already harvested - and I am very happy about this - is of course the ginger harvest.
I recently figured out that one of the large clumps of plants that we had in our garden stemmed from a piece of ginger that my mother had planted there years ago. No-one ever knew that she did this, and she has since forgotten about it. The result was that no-one ever bothered to harvest the ginger.
This year I decided that I would dig some up and see what was happening below. we ended up digging out the entire ginger bush and splitting the plants with enough root to re-establish them in a more suited spot so that they can root better, as the place where they had been growing was very hard and arid soil saturated with large pieces of quarts stone. Certainly not the best environment for roots to establish. Never the less I managed to salvage a decent amount of ginger for the house - and given that the price of ginger here is relatively high, it really was a bonus getting some straight from the earth at the cost of a little bit of digging...
Farm is bustling with ripening fruits, gooseberries another "hands up" for favourite fresh, or in a jam.
Finding the ginger, what a bonus, sounds like you are enjoying being home at the farm, wishing you a wonderful day @breezin