Look at This! Surprise 🌝

This year has been an exceptionally blessed year for rain, here in the Holy Land. And in addition I had taken a neighbor's advice and watered the two barren citrus trees in our garden.

One tree is a lemon tree I had bought well over twenty years ago, and the other is from a sapling one of our sons brought back from a hike a few years after we had planted the lemon tree. We'll refer to the second one as "the mystery tree."

Over a decade ago, I remember seeing some small orange fruit on the mystery tree but don't remeber even trying to eat them. They were terribly small and hard.

For the past few months I've been noticing a number of orange-colored fruit growing on the mystery tree. At first they seemed to high to be picked, but yesterday when I walked by, I could see that there were quite a few of these fruit low enough, even for me. So, today, after my morning walk, I went over to the tree and decided to take a better look.

I picked one fruit from the tree, smelled it decided to take a bite. What could be wrong? They hadn't even sprayed with poisons. Yes, they're organic, completely organic.

One of my guesses, due to size, was that they were some sort of clementina, which is a small tangerine, an easy to peel citrus fruit. Here in Israel the clementina is the first of the winter citrus fruit offered for sale, late summer, early winter. The clementina has a very thin skin/peel, thinner than any orange I'm familiar with.

Test #1 This mystery fruit has a relatively thick skin for its size, but as you can see in the pictures, it's a tiny fruit. Now, I don't know if the mystery fruit is supposed to be small, or if the difficult dry and cold climate here has damaged/stunted it.

Test #2 was the taste test. The mystery fruit tastes something like an orange. I'll leave them on the tree a bit longer and taste them periodically, to see if they get sweeter with time. Of course the challenge is to pick them before they rot on the tree.

I'd be grateful for advice, thanks.