I went to The Farm on Sunday and  I came back with a boot load of delicious goods and plenty of splinters in my hands (one day, I will actually remember to wear gloves whilst sorting through the macadamia leaves seeking out the nuts). I returned with oranges (Navels and Valencias), mandarins, bush (macadamia) nuts, a pumpkin and some flowers.
I was a little late picking up the bush nuts this year, mostly due to Uni commitments and also in part I guess to not wanting to go to The Farm as I wasn’t sure what my emotions  would be, particularly as a lot of my memories of Grandad in the recent years have been around macadamia harvesting process. I got three boxes full of bush nuts. I husked the two smaller boxes this afternoon and have the large box to go. I should end up with a bit more than a milk crate worth of bush nuts in their shells. Then they will go into the deep freeze for a couple of  months before I start shelling them. Whilst the bush nuts waited for me, the mandarin tree didn’t and I only got a very small box of mandarins. I won’t have enough mandarins to make any more mandarin jam 🙁 🙁 I’ll have to be conservative with the mandarin jam till next year. I did however get plenty of oranges 🙂 which means there will be plenty of orange cakes, eating oranges and who knows what else.  I’ve already got a bottle of orange extract steeping in the cupboard and I’m most certainly getting my daily vitamin C intake at the moment 🙂
I had a few tears over this one Lady Jane.
Now I am over the tears, more or less, what is orange extract?