I noticed our blood orange tree was dropping oranges yesterday, which doesn’t happen unless they are ripe, so time for harvest today! Couldn’t tell by appearance this year, as there was so much rain just as the fruit was coming in. The blood oranges need a lot of sun during their final two months on the tree, to develop their characteristic red blush and vanilla fragrance. These look a lot more like regular navel oranges, though the juice is still red and delicious.
The crop is much larger than normal this year, as you can see in the first two pictures. Normally I will pick 400 blood oranges from the tree, and they are medium size. this year, about 650 oranges and they are large. It is only taking eight to nine oranges to make a quart/liter of juice, so it looks to be about a 20 gallon yield.
Please enjoy these four pictures of the process and result:
Winged Victory 