Key Lime Harvest

My Key Lime bush is full of limes and there is only so much tonic one can flavor with the tart little fruit. My wife, a woman of many gifts is unhappily not a baker so Key Lime Pie is out of reach but she is an inventive cook so she figured on treating the limes another way.


Using her handy dandy Mexican citrus press, purchased years ago on a trip south of the Rio Bravo, she squeezed the juice into an ice tray. Now if we need to deploy key limes out of season all we have to do is fish around in the freezer.


It was, let's face it, a massacre of fruit.


But that was not torture enough for the native Keys' fruit. The skin is as intense as the rest of the fruit, peculiarly adapted to a region of poor soil and sporadic rain and lots of salt. Key Lime zest is equally well flavored.


Our little bush has been producing like crazy and the round yellow balls sit on the counter, as decorative as the Italian Deruta bowl in which they sit.


They grow like tiny acorns budding everywhere after the yellow and white flowers bloom and die.


By the time they are properly yellow they are ripe for picking. left unmolested they will simply fall to the ground where they remain fresh and usable until brown spots start to appear and indicate the fruit is now rotting from the inside out.


As you can judge by comparison with the tip of my index finger the fruit is as small as a quarter in diameter but it packs lots of citrus flavor.


And the modest prickly bush with a little fertilizer (I use Milorganite for simplicity) and a soaking watering every few days will churn out fruit with no apparent problem. Summer by contrast is the dormant period this far south.


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