All is Good on the Satsuma Front

When my parents moved six years ago, they gave us their potted Satsuma orange tree. The first year, it produced a glorious crop of 40-50 little oranges. Then, because I’m such a horrible gardener, it was attacked by whiteflies and black sooty mold, and it took several years of regular treatments with garlic-pepper-seaweed tea, compost tea, horticultural oil, and insecticidal soap (and me spending hours with wet paper towels, gently scrubbing the soot off each individual leaf). The poor little tree was too sick to produce any oranges.

Eventually, the whiteflies stopped coming back.

Last spring it produced dozens of tiny little orange blossom buds like this, which turned into teeny tiny oranges, about 1 mm across… and all promptly fell off after about 2 weeks of growth.

This spring we’ve got teeny tiny orange flower buds again. I’m keeping my fingers crossed for fruit!