Today, we are taking a break from coffee pruning and clearing.  We have pruned and cut two of the three farms which amounts to a huge amount of chain saw work and lots of wood.   

We are actually managing to sell some of it which is a pleasant surprise after several offers to just remove it for free.

Now we are onto the third farm where there are hundreds of orange trees as the main shade for the coffee.

I have become quite ruthless after a year of living full time with oranges.   The romance with oranges is over.  By the time I am old, I expect people will be subject to the same fate.  For now, only oranges.  

The orange trees around the house are at least 40 yrs old.  Some were diseased from the inside in the wood.  They cost more to care for and pick than we get for the fruit.  Most importantly, they stand in the way of new adventures and a rose garden expansion around the house.  

Still picking coffee and we will be going on well into January.  My main worker is even coming 'off' vacation to wear my bee suit tomorrow and pick around the hives.   Good for him.  I am otherwise occupied with just 3 days left to Christmas.

The orange harvest will be over soon, probably in about 2-3 weeks.   So a final push to candy oranges.  My maid peeled about 300 or so for extra Christmas money over the last couple of days........kitchen is full of rind steeping in syrup and in various stages of processing. Fridge jam packed with juice.

We have done most of the workers food baskets.  Another trip to David today for things to finish them off.   This year, we are going to help out a family who used to live on the farm.   A single mother with three children who is making around $26 every two weeks ($52 a month) working full time.  Yes, it is not legal but it happens.

Christmas shopping trip in close 100 degree weather down the mountain in David is tough.  On the other hand, here you get service.   You do not have to carry your bags around the shop or to your car and people are there to help you find what you need.  There is also excellent wrapping services in most shops.  All you have to do is find the shop (not as easy as it sounds); Find parking (even harder);  check over all merchandise more than once and thoroughly (Here there is a very high incidence of returns, not quite right things and wonky parts) and then stagger in and out in the extreme heat.  

Then bananas - yes, what happened to all my bananas? Not just my bananas but all the bananas in this banana rich town.  I like to have a supply by the terrace so we can watch birds when we relax out there - something I am looking forward to over the holiday.

Well, the coffee pickers have an appetite for them.   I would love to know how much of the diet is banana, but I bet it is somewhere between 10-30% if you include plantains.  There must be 5-10 thousand Indigenous camping out in Boquete for the coffee harvest and that amounts to a lot of bananas.   So, my birds are not getting so many these days, the horse is getting carrots, the rabbit has been eating grass and I have not had one for breakfast for nearly a month.... 

Lastly, what is all that sound of gunfire?  Sounds like someone is firing rounds day and night in the Barrio above me.  I feel like I'm under attack.  Well, it turns out it is fireworks.  It is normal.  It will last until the New Year.

In an orange hole of my own making - time to stop digging any deeper.

The precise moment I realized how deep the hole was, was last night.   Gazing into the crystalline byproduct of my orange candying.   The fact is it looked, felt and even smelt very like the sugar I have used in the past to wax my legs with.   We have been getting some nice bare leg weather this week.  I mulled over the idea of testing my crystalline gooey sugar on my shins for about 10 seconds.  Thankfully common sense prevailed.

You see the desire not to let the oranges drop and rot on the ground is very strong.    However, this instinct to preserve can easily escalate into some out of control behaviors.   A bit like the old lady who swallowed a fly and ended up eating a horse - she is dead, of course.  

The orange version of the slippery slope goes like this.   

Step 1: Start juicing and sending Beatrice to school with bottles of juice and drinking it yourself

Step 2: Buy sugar, boil and make cordials - keeps longer, easier than squeezing every morning

Step 3: Buy even more sugar and pectin (which you bring down in your suitcase with mucho trouble from customs who want to know more about the white powder) and make marmalade. 

Step 3.5: Marmalade is a venture you can spend a LONG time on. Get side tracked with different citrus combinations and mixing with coffee and other fruits.  This is a large topic, large enough to earn a PhD at least.  It extends into cake making - marmalade cakes are delicious - coffee and orange marmalade cake scores very high.

Step 4:  Buy still more sugar and pay the maid overtime to peel and chop skins for candying.........

Step 5: Don't go there - what to do with orange flavored syrup left over.  Climbing up Volcan Baru would not burn enough calories.  Tempting to use to wax legs with............but not tempting enough.

Repeat above steps for various citrus.........navel sweet oranges, mandarin oranges, mandarin lemons, persian lemons and so on...

Yes, it is time to stand back and take a deep breath.  My maid tells me she is bringing me some tree tomatoes and other goodies from the high mountain tomorrow to play with.

The oranges just won't stop ripening.   It is exhausting.   The harvest will likely be over by the end of November this year.   There are growing piles of orange gold sitting around the farm this morning.   Normally, I would have oranges at least through January.  With the hot, relatively dry, summer the oranges are all ripening up quickly.

I have pulled the caretaker and a full time coffee worker for orange picking duties for a few days.  This at least cuts down some of the labor costs.   We may even break-even.   

So, another 4000 or so leave today on our Coffee Manager's truck, I delivered 100 to a lady customer.   Finally, we made more marmalade.  Although satisfying, marmalade only used up 30 oranges.    Apparently, my oranges are the sweetest freshest in Boquete but unfortunately sold to the market by the 100, I do not get any credit for that.

My little marmalades are becoming quite popular.   I am making a coffee and orange mixture that is the essence of Boquete as well as this farm.  It  tastes very good especially on scones, somewhat too delicious.  Trouble is there is only so much marmalade a girl can make comfortably in a week; And only so many scones and marmalade a girl should eat in a month.  Yesterday, I swapped some marmalade for strawberries from a friends strawberry farm up the mountain and we had strawberries for dinner and smoothies for breakfast this morning.  My offer stands to all within a delivery radius of my farm.... what will you give me in exchange for oranges?  Life is good.  

They say necessity is the mother of invention.   The pickers are all out picking coffee and I have more oranges, gazillions more.  They are delicious, sweet juicy, seedless oranges, but nobody except me and the gardener to pick them until Saturday.

So, tonight I made a prototype batch of Coffee and Orange marmalade.    Boquete coffees are famous for their sweet citrus floral notes.   This is a not so subtle attempt to mix the two and it is a marriage made in heaven.  The orange gives the citrus, the peel the floral  and the local natural sugar lends a hint of caramel.

Only one problem - it looks more like a jar of branston pickle than orange marmalade.

Orange farming  is a form of charity.    Orange related activities do provide work for pickers and in due course for anyone who trims or fertilizes the plants.   It is good honest, fairly pleasant work for a surprising number of people for quite a surprising number of days.   I get to watch it happen and open my wallet - so, I think the best way of looking at this is to smile, relax and call it charitable giving.    Today, my charitable giving orange style was concluded for a little while as the last of those sacks was taken off the farm this fine Sunday morning.

I will in the end make an orange loss once I have cared for the trees.  Right now we have just sold the second or third batch this year, I loose count.  It was the biggest take of the year around 15K oranges.    The surplus between sales and picking costs contributed to cash flow  approximately the value of a couple of nice lunches in Boquete for Beatrice and myself in town. 

Want to know when it really hurt?:  I was unable to persuade Beatrice against the idea of a $2 and something orange juice in the Panamonte with her fancy lunch..... which is 50 cents more than I got for selling one hundred small oranges this week, never mind picking costs.  Probably, the same oranges that are being juiced all over town and sold in restaurants for good prices.   Ooooch.   The poor girl is getting orange juice in her packed lunches every day and I think a strawberry smoothie would have been a much better choice.   Oh well, at least someone in the family is still in love with orange juice.

Three men for four days at the rate of about 3000 oranges a day or more.   Orange picking is a fairly gentlemanly occupation, it involves prodding the tree with a stick, shaking things a little and maybe climbing a branch or two.  They are easy climbers.   The oranges are collected in little piles all over the farm, then moved into bigger piles, then sorted for size and put into bags.

The economics of orange growing are a joke, I think if I fertilize and trim the trees, I would loose money.   Which I probably will!  I'll net a couple of hundred dollars after picking costs.     Mainly, I want to get them out before they drop on the soil - each one is an acid bomb.

Well, tomorrow my orange problem should be over.  Hopefully every last one will be bagged and sold.  Then I will be orange free for maybe 3 weeks or a month before then next batch come online and I get distracted from coffee again.

In the meantime, I thought I would share some of the alternative ways of dealing with oranges that I have been trying out.   Not sure who thought that orange juice with toast and marmalade was healthy for breakfast, I feel terrible. 

Actually, I know exactly who thought of orange juice and toast and marmalade for breakfast. Yes, marmalade is a Scottish invention.  It all started over a 100 yrs ago when a ship full of oranges arrived in the port of Dundee, Scotland and the oranges started to rot.   Being frugal, business like and also having tons of sugar coming into the same port - they thought of marmalade.  So the origin of this habit was not nutritional more typical Scottish behavior.  Here I am 100 years or so later falling into the same trap, my genetics getting me into trouble again, yikes.

It is pretty easy to give away oranges.  Maybe why I have had somewhat limited success selling them on the 'private market'  - too many people are giving them away already.   That said, I have bartered them for eggs,  riding lesson/pony pals for Beatrice, in part payment for a foot seminar @ the fabulous Boquete Body Mind Doho.  I am now on a roll with this barter thing.... Open to offers, what will ya give me for oranges?  I could really do with a manicure or pedicure, other veggies would be nice.  In particular, anyone who could swap me organic potatoes can have as many oranges as they want.

Thank the Lord for small mercies:  There is something rather special about orange trees, other than the oranges.  That is the bark is rough and lends itself to growing orchids and bromeliads on it.     In fact my trees are covered in wild bromeliads.   I have started to plant ornamental ones on the ones closest to the house.  That should distract me from the fruit. Some of the bromeliads per the photo are quite colorful.  Same with orchids.

Another cunning trick along the same lines came from an idea I have seen working in California.  About six months ago, I planted 30 passion fruit plants on as many trees.  The idea being that they take the tree over, cover it with pretty blue passion fruit flowers and then give me a fruit which is worth more in the market than oranges.    After 3-4 years or so, they get felled for firewood.  We have already felled 20 of the oldest trees and my worker is today collecting the wood and putting it under a tarp to dry.   I hear it is the very best wood for a fire that there is and am looking forward to some cold damp nights gazing into the embers and thinking of something other than oranges.

One of the three small farms that makes up the property is planted with orange.  The orange is a shade tree for coffee and also a commercial crop although few new plantations are using them, they are barely profitable.

Right now my orange situation is stressing me out.  The local flocks of parrots on the other hand are very happy.  I probably have about 10K of them out there.  I wake up to them staring at me out of my bedroom window.  They are visible from the terrace, everywhere I turn I see oranges.  The truck is coming from the City on Tuesday or Wednesday and I intend it to be full of my fruit. I want it all out of here.
  
Yesterday, I sold around 500 and made a little over $20.  Today, I had a 'pick your own day' - not wildly popular, but anything seemed worth a try.  

I am wondering how many orange trees I need for personal use.  Drinking juice for breakfast, sending Beatrice off to school with a big plastic bottles full of the stuff and downing rum cocktails before dinner, using kilos of sugar making marmalade.  In total, this consumption is utterly insignificant.    At this point, I would not be devastated if I never saw another orange again.  Unfortunately, the orange harvest runs through January.  It is amazing really how much fruit these trees produce.

50 years ago Boquete was famous for the little coffee farms growing coffee under orange trees and there is a wonderful mural in the Boquete Bistro depicting this scene.  It looks just like my little farm, so pretty all surrounded by the mountains in the background.

My trees are all old and were planted during this romantic era of ladies in billowy skirts on ladders picking oranges assisted by indigenous workers and family  members.    The story of the mural in Bistro Boquete is dreamy - right now, I'm sceptical it was ever thus.

Soon, I'll be writing about other things to do with orange trees for example: Burn them for firewood; plant bromeliads and orchids on them, use them as large frames for passion fruit; make liqueur out of the blossoms................