Orange Picking

My ideal vacations-away-from-home involve visits to fruit orchards and factories where cheese, chocolate, candy and local crafts (or anything, really) are made. In Minnesota, we have made a summer/fall tradition of fruit-picking each year, but only berries and apples grow where we live.So when we were in Florida last December, I was thrilled to discover a citrus grove 15 minutes away from our villa. Hurrah! 

We spent the morning walking through the trees, scrutinizing and picking oranges, grapefruit, lemons, kumquats and pomelos. The relatives came, too.

The oranges we picked were nothing like the squeaky-clean variety we buy in the supermarkets, but they were the sweetest and juiciest we had ever had.

Here's a pomelo - we didn't pick any of these because we didn't feel like eating or packing them in our suitcases to take home with us. 

We did pick quite a few oranges and rationed them out throughout the early part of the winter, to make them last.