luscious lemon

Around this time last year I bought some fruit trees at the local County Extension Service Master Gardener's Sale.  One was a lemon.  All year long we've been watching the tree grow.  It produced just one lonely lemon fruit of enormous proportions - you can see it in it's growing phase here.  We have been waiting for it to ripen.

Today was the day.  Yellow all the way down, smelling fragrantly of....grapefruit?  We decided that this was the perfect time to harvest our one and only lemon.

Turns out it really is a lemon, in spite of the grapefruit-y aroma.  It's huge and juicy, and the flavor is definitely that of lemon.  We all stood around eating small bites of it.  We decided that it's not quite as tart as most lemons, still a bit puckery, however there is a hint of sweetness to it.

As you can see it has an amazing amount of seeds in it.  We're trying to decide if this is normal for this lemon or if it's just because there was only one fruit.

My hope is that next year we will have more lemons as the tree matures, and each year after that even more.  I have a friend whose 12 year old lemon tree is so productive she mails boxes to relatives every year.  For us even this one lemon is a delight.  It was a great moment to harvest, yet again, something that we grew and all marvel at the fact that we produced something of our very own (with the help of Mother Nature of course) from our teeny-tiny backyard.

 As I write this I am enjoying a cup of darjeeling tea with a slice of lemon and somehow, because it came from my garden?, it just tastes better.