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I was out deadheading the roses today when I noticed a few late-emerging artichoke heads--I thought the season was well over! That's something to note in my garden calendar. The garden calendar is a long-term project to track when various things typically come ripe and how long their season is. One reason is for the "blink and you'll miss it" crops. The other reason is so I can be mentally prepared when it comes time to do serious harvest processing. I mean, not that it's helped to know that the Seville oranges come ripe around the New Year, since I often haven't had time in January to do things with them. (This year I finally harvested the last bushel in May, which wasn't optimal in terms of quality.)

The other crop that's currently delighting me is the blueberries. Combining the fact that blueberries ripen individually rather than all at once, plus the fact that I deliberately planted varieties with a range of harvest seasons, I could well have a steady supply of about a cup every week for the entire summer. Last year they weren't entirely happy for unclear reasons, but this year they're going great guns.

The tomatoes are setting but none are coming ripe quite yet, which the calendar says is typical. It should be a good season, though. I'm trying a different irrigation method this year--soaker hose that loops around the bed, rather than the oscillating sprinkler. I've spinkled radish and onion seeds along the line of the soaker and I'm getting a steady supply of the former for my salads.

I've spotted two apricots. Not ripe yet, but they should be in a couple of weeks, if some critter doesn't get them first. They're on a very low branch. Maybe I should do something to try to protect them. The cherries will ripen sometime this month, based on past results. The calendar says that the plums will come in July.

I have two rituals that clearly mark the turning from winterish season to summerish season: setting the thermostat to "off" and doing the walkdown of the irrigation system. I did both of those today.

I have two (actually three) independent irrigation systems. The front yard (excepting the citrus grove) is on one system with 6 circuits. For that one, the walkdown is mostly a matter of making sure none of the risers have gotten broken (e.g., by tripping over them) or are trapped by vegetation, or for the <360 sprayers, have gotten twisted out of their coverage zones. The only fiddly bits are the lines coming off one of the risers that branch out to cover the two planter boxes and the gooseberry bushes. Those need to have the nozzles checked and maybe get re-staked into position.

The backyard hard-piped system has 3 circuits. One covers the formal herb garden and--in theory--the vegetable beds. But it doesn't really have enough pressure to do the veg beds, so I have a separate oscillating sprinkler on a hose with a battery-powered timer that covers the veg. One circuit covers the citrus grove and the strawberry beds, which I kept telling my contractor was a bad idea because the citrus grove wants periodic long soaking but the strawberries want daily watering. He wasn't always very good at listening, and that was one of the cases where I thought we'd talked it out and then at the end of the job I found out he'd done it his way after all. Sigh. The third circuit covers the fruit trees, which does allow for the periodic long soaking that works best.

Not much maintenance needed this year: a handful of micro-spray nozzles needed replacing, but no chewed up tubing this time.

Doing the walkdown also means checking out various plants that I don't always look at closely in off season. The Oro Blanco grapefruit--after presenting me with its first (and lonely) fruit last year, is blooming all over the place this year. Either it simply decided it was ready to fruit (as signalled by last year's crop) or it's really really happy about all the rain. Or both. All the apple trees are flowering madly. As usual, the multiple-graft pear shows no signs of flowering at all. You win some, you lose some. That tree grows ok, but hasn't ever produced anything. Some years I do get a few flowers, but it's gone beyond a question of "let it settle in."

I picked the first strawberries of the season--three tiny Alpines, which are always the earliest. My to-do list still includes transplanting strawberries out of the beds surrounding the herb garden and into the dedicated strawberry beds. This probably means I'll put the transplants off fruiting much this year, but all in all they'll be happier.

It looks like the artichokes will present me with one dinner's worth per week for the duration. I'm picking them at about tennis ball sized because they're a bit of an aphid magnet which gets nasty if I wait for the buds to open up much.

Having somewhat desultorily decided to try doing a garden diary to track when things come ripe (but having decided to do it during a year when the extended winter rains make it an unusual schedule) I took some notes for a "check-in" after mowing the lawn yesterday. So here is a snapshot of what my yard is doing at the moment, focusing primarily on food plants.

Crandall (red) currants all blooming.
Black currants leafed out but no blooms yet.
Blueberries mostly blooming but at different stages (as intended when I got lots of different varieties). The "Top Hat" (planted this year) as produced its second berry, securing its place as the early producer this year. (The description says it ripens "mid-season" which other descriptions seem to equate with "summer/fall" so who knows.)
Persimmon is finally leafing out, but it's only in its second year so I don’t expect fruit or even likely blooms.
Gooseberries are leafing but no blooms yet.
Artichokes are very energetic but no buds yet.
Kumquats are starting to fall from the tree, so I should pick them and preserve. (Got a suggested pickled kumquat recipe a few days ago that I may try, since I still have oodles of candied kumquats.)
Picked the Buddha's hand citron (half a dozen) as one had dropped. I think I'll try the pickle recipe out on this first.
Black Tartarian cherry is blooming a lot but it isn’t coordinated with its designated pollinator yet. The designated pollinator is a Bing, but it's only in its second year, so I'll give it some slack. Last year I did get a few Tartarian cherries, so there's something in the neighborhood that it's compatible with.
The Morello cherry is starting an abundant bloom. I hope all the rain will make this a good year. It's my best producer among the cherries so far. (The Montmorency hasn't started blooming yet. They're both self-fertile so the timing is less important. I got half a dozen Montmorencies last year.)
Quince blooms are very abundant and I need to remember to thin the fruit this year.
All the apples are just starting to leaf out and not blooming yet.
The apricot is starting to bloom but looks sparse. I don't know what's up with the apricot. At this point it's a large, vigorous tree. (My pruning goal is to keep the branches within easy reach.) But so far I haven't gotten more than half a dozen fruit in any year.
One medlar is finishing blooming and the other hasn’t started yet. Very strange.
The Pre-existing Plum (I just invented this nickname. I think it may be a damson type, but who knows?) has set fruit and it looks like it may be a great year.
The new Santa Rosa Plum is thinking about whether it wants to set fruit but it’s still a baby, so that's ok.
The strawberries are blooming but no fruit yet.
And, of course, both lemon trees are doing their continuous year-round thing.
The two newish juice oranges aren't showing any signs of flowering, but I'm getting used to the idea that citrus will take a few years to settle in and get happy.
The onion sets that I got in the ground a couple weeks ago are poking up green but I'll need to keep a close eye on moisture so I'll know when to start irrigation. And it's probably time to plant the tomatoes. Maybe I'll go off to my favorite nursery this afternoon and see what they have.

A "memory" on facebook reminded me that I've been thinking of keeping a garden/orchard calendar, tracking when things are coming ripe, how much I harvest, etc. So since it's the beginning of the year, I'll start off with the 2023 POME records. I may fill in bits and pieces from my photo albums. (Too much work to try to sift through the facebook stuff.)

January 8

Tomatoes: Still a few green and half-ripe cherry tomatoes that made it through the frosts and storms. Collected enough for a stir-fry, but that's it for the year. Time to pull out the plants.

Medlars: I was experimenting with leaving the medlars on the tree to blet, rather than harvesting them hard and letting them blet in a paper bag or basket. But then I didn't check on them before the storms that came through last week and most were knocked off the tree. I gathered up all the ones that were both bletted and non-splatted. Processing them resulted in about 3c of medlar butter. (Squeeze out the pulp, then cook it with enough water to form a slurry. Process through a sieve to remove the seads and fibers. Cook down until it's the consistency of apple butter -- a thickish paste. No added sugar, so put in sterilized jars hot, but store in the refrigerator and use fairly promptly.)

Citrus

Lemons: Both the anonymous backyard lemon tree and the Meyer lemon in the citrus grove are producing continuously, as usual. The backyard tree is dropping fruit so I should gather and do some juicing.

Kumquats: The kumquats have been gradually ripening for about a month or so? So count them as starting to come ripe in December. (I think I have photos of when I picked the first of the season.) Plentiful crop -- if I picked them all at once, it would probably be 3-4 quarts. (But I won't because they aren't all ripe at once.) They stay on the tree well when ripe, so I've been picking a handful each time I'm out there and putting them in stir fry. They go well in salad when it's salad season, so I'm guessing they may stay ripe that long?

Bearss Lime: I've picked several, starting about a month ago. I learned last year that they tend to drop from the tree when past ripe, so I need to stay on top of them. I've never had so many that I needed to find specific recipes for them. Mostly I tend to use them in drinks, or as a lemon substitute. When I made this year's quince paste the recipe called for lemon juice as the cooking liquid and I used a combination of lemon, lime, and Seville orange juice. I think there are fewer than a dozen in this year's crop, which is about the same as last year.

Buddha's Hand Citron: Again, they started coming ripe about a month ago, but are ripening at various rates. I've only picked one so far and several are still quite green. Fewer than last year's bumper crop, but I haven't actually counted. I think I'm mostly going to candy them this year. The ones I candied last year didn't have enough moisture removed and came over with white mold so I threw them out.

Grapefruit: This is a retrospective. I had one fruit each on the Ruby and Oro Blanco trees, both ripening in December. I picked them right around the end of the year. Hope for more this year. The Ruby was a new tree last year and came with the fruit started (so I was lucky it survived the transplant shock). The Oro Blanco has been in place since 2016 and this is the first fruit. I suspect irrigation levels are the key, as 2022 was the first full year of the current irrigation system and I think all the citrus is happier for it.

Seville Orange: OMG. Once again I have a massive crop on both trees. (Why did I think I needed a second Seville orange tree?) Starting in December I've picked a few to test ripeness (since most still had a bit of green on the rind, but I wasn't sure if they might be re-greening). They look pretty much all ripe at this point, so they'll be the bit January project. I still have marmalade from several different years, but I'm running very low on candied peel, so I think I'll mostly focus on candying this year. But I also need to restock the zest-in-sugar which I use regularly in baking. I dried some zest last year, which is good in spiced tea, so maybe I should do something more systematic with that too. Candying peel means that I have juice too. Last year I made up some orange sauce (juice in reduced duck broth) but I haven't remembered to use it. I may do some of that again, or just freeze cubes of juice to use in cooking. One of the ideas of growing Sevilles was to have sour orange juice for medieval recipes that called for it, but my bumper crops started coming after I'd drifted out of the SCA. Ah, the life rhythms that don't quite synchronize!

Juice Oranges: The two juice oranges (Valencia and Trovita) didn't set fruit last year, but they were only planted in 2021 so I'm happy to give them time to settle in.

Thai Lime: I think I've figured out which tree this is by process of elimination. If so, it's the sad little thing that is now at one end of the grape arbor. For various reasons, it's always struggled. If I think it can spare a leaf, I may pick one and see if I'm right. Or I may continue to leave it alone and see what happens.

Everything else is dormant currently. Needed tasks are pruning the fruit trees (heck, Pruning All The Things!), transplanting more of the strawberries from the cane-berry beds into the dedicated strawberry beds. And weeding. Always weeding. If I want to try a winter vegetable crop, this is when I should be doing it. It's also when the light levels and weather mean I don't get much yardwork done beyond the essentials.

I have four cherry trees, at varying stages of becoming happy and productive. Two heirloom sour cherries (Morello and Montmorency) and two more modern sweet cherries (Black Tartarian and Bing). The sour cherries have steadily been increasing their output year by year. The Morello was planted in 2013 and spent several years giving me just enough for a smallish cherry tart. This year, the output was up to 2 cups of pitted cherries, which would be enough for a full pie, but I've frozen them in tart-sized aliquots because that's how I roll. The Montmorency is a few years younger and hadn't really produced enough to do more than get rolled in with the Morellos until this year when I got about a cup after pitting.

The sweet cherries have been a bit more tardy, though it's not entirely their fault. They aren't self-fertile and need each other for pollination. I'd planted the Black Tartarian in 2013 but hadn't gotten a pollinator yet until 2016 when I planted a Coral Champagne. But the Coral decided to die on me a couple years later and it took me a couple years to get around to replacing it. The Bing went in at the beginning of this year and wasn't really up to flowering yet so no fruit and no pollen. Oddly enough, I did actually get three cherries off the Black Tartarian last year when it shouldn't have produce anything at all, so either it's fertile wiht the sour cherries or there's another cherry tree in bee-commuting distance in the neighborhood.

Anyway, three cups of pie-worthy cherries this year! I just had my first tiny cherry tart. In the local Ranch 99 market (a large Asian-specialty chain) I spotted the perfect tart shells for single servings -- marketed for egg tarts. I baked four tarts and all the rest of the cherries are freezing in an ice cube tray -- about the right amount for those tart shells.

People ask me whether I have problems with bird depredation and oddly enough I haven't had trouble with that. I've seen evidence that the birds take a couple, but not the "descend on the whole crop" thing. I should probably hang mylar streamers or the equivalent as a precaution, but like most things I'll probably wait to get motivated until a year when I lose a crop.

The thing about planting fruit trees is that it's a long-term prospect. About half of the trees I've planted have been in the ground 8-9 years. The rest mostly within the last 5 years. Some of the trees have yet to produce any fruit. (I've more more less given up on the multiple-graft pear tree. I think it's just in a bad location, but it's too late to do anything about now.) A couple of the citrus trees are still thinking about being productive, but my experience has been that it can take them 4-5 years to settle in and then...wham!

At this point, there really isn't any good place to plant more fruit trees. Oh, technically I could fit a couple more in, but it would be in places that I'd rather leave open. But you know, 30 fruit trees on a quarter acre lot isn't too bad at all! I stick to the semi-dwarf and dwarf habits to fit more variety in (and to make it more likely I can actually pick the fruit) And I can pretty much fulfill my fantasy of growing all the fruit I eat, though there are long stretches of the year when it's frozen plums, dried apples, and all the lemons I can use. I don't have any illusions about self-sufficiency for vegetables, but I do love my orchard.

(I started this in fb but it got too long for that format so I posted it here instead.)

Last evening of vacation (though technically, today is our displaced holiday for New Years). I feel like I haven't been posting much anywhere in the last three weeks. I probably have, but if I haven't then maybe that was part of my vacation?

Worldcon was fun, if fraught with worries about omicron. (Based on post-convention Covid reports, it sounds like all the precautions did their job. The incidence rate was significantly lower than the general DC population in the same period.) NYC was relaxing, since Lauri and I decided to ditch any plans to see shows or go to museums and mostly just hung out.

I was a coming back to California, I was anxious enough about exposure that even after 2 consecutive days of negative tests I stayed masked for the New Years Eve/Day hangout with family. Another post-visit test was still negative so if BinaxNow is to be trusted, I seem to have gotten through all the travels without picking up any viral hitchhikers.

Got a bunch of blog/podcast writing done during vacation. Today's project was to play-test doing a video 'cast, combining the usual audio with a slideshow, and just to make things more challenging, including and embedded image of me doing the script. Zoom has some great tools (designed for academic settings) for this sort of thing. I've even worked out how to edit around re-takes in video without having to touch iMovie. I don't plan to shift the podcast to video as a usual thing. (For one thing, the editing is *much* faster when it's audio only and I'm doing it in Audacity.) But this will be much easier than the kludgy method I used for my only other slideshow episode, and I rather like the idea of having my face on-screen alongside the slides. (It does mean that I have to design the slide-show with a blank corner where my image will be.)

I've started the winter garden chores: pruning the roses (and other stuff), doing the soil-work stuff that is much easier when the ground is damp. I got an email from Trees of Antiquity that they're coming up on delivery season. Or rather, pick-up season since I took that option. I figured it was worth the combination of saving the shipping cost and an excuse for a minor road trip. (They're in Paso Robles, so abut 200 miles each way.) I'm getting a Bing cherry to replace one that failed to thrive, a Santa Rosa plum because one can never have too many plum trees, and some black and red currants and gooseberries because the blueberries are being successful as landscaping plants in the front yard and I have lots of space for more smallish berry shrubs. (I've tried currants and gooseberries in the back yard before and they were never happy about how little water they got. But in the front, where the irrigation is aimed at keeping the roses and the grass happy, they should get plenty.) So the trick will be getting all the holes dug before I pick up the plants.

I'm anticipating having a good year for the fruit trees, since the amount of ground water seems to be a significant factor. And we're getting a lovely amount of rain at the moment.

 When I fall off the wagon of posting here regularly, I really fall. Two weeks since I even read my reading list. Almost three since I posted.

I can feel the turn of the seasons. Back in the Before Times, I'd measure the end of summer by the light levels on leaving and returning home. Now the most granular measurement is the angle of the sun at 8am when I "go to the office". Since my house aligns NW to SE with the back wall (and my office window) facing NE, the angle of the early morning sun is very evident. Which side of the curtains do I need to draw? At what time? And when can I pull them out of the way again?

But there's also the fact that it's still twilight at my normal rising time, so I've gotten out the "daylight" alarm clock again (the one that turns a light on gradually at a set time). And sitting here at 7:30 in the evening, the sun is down already. At high summer, it's light until my preferred bedtime. [Side note: I swear I'm hearing coyotes crying out in the hills. Might be some other source, but coyotes aren't implausible.] I need to start thinking about some things I want to do for winter mode of WFH. My office doesn't have any built-in lighting and the various portable lights aren't doing the trick. I'm thinking of having recessed ceiling lights installed like I did in the library.

I spent almost all weekend working on podcast stuff. Not the usual tasks of writing scripts and editing recordings, but instead re-mastering all the existing episodes (all 174 of them) in preparation for something I'll be announcing in the next podcast episode. It was very tedious but I got to a point where I decided to just power through and finish the job.

I feel like my quarantine brain has turned a corner in the last couple weeks. I read a couple of e-books this weekend. (Short story and novella, but still...) By necessity I'm back in a regular routine of reading and summarizing for the LHMP blog. On Saturday, I cleaned one side of the garage! The other side requires me to think seriously about how to arranged my "workbench" area. No actual workbench, but that's where it would go if I had it. In fact, organizing it probably requires actually acquiring a workbench with storage area for larger items underneath as well as surfaces that are usable for projects. Ha. This assumes that--now that I'm not making medieval camp furniture--I'm likely to actually do major woodworking projects. But you never know.

It's also time to start thinking about what I want to do with the garden over the winter. Before, I just let it rest because I never had enough daylight at home to do anything serious in the winter. But now? I'm thinking about trying some cold weather crops. Definitely start some winter onions, maybe try peas and beans? And speaking of the produce of my estates, I was checking out the citrus grove the other day and my Buddha's hand citron has two fruits! Plus, the kumquat tree is covered with blossoms. I have my second bushel basket of apples needing to be processed. After that, a break before I need to do anything with the pomegranates, quinces, and medlars. In the mean time, it's still high summer as far as the tomatoes and eggplant are concerned. The secret to eggplant seems to be to give them enough water. (My water bill is suggesting to me that I find a slightly happier medium.)

And now it's dark and the mosquitos are waking up, so time to go back inside and do something productive again.

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 I got distracted yesterday evening getting another podcast uploaded. At least PastMe had already edited it and created the show notes. (The only reason I hadn't already uploaded it was I wasn't certain which month I'd be posting it.) And I have two interviews scheduled for this weekend and sent out another round of "Uh...just touching base again since I haven't heard back. You still interested in being on the podcast?" emails. This a think that really hits me in the imposter syndrome. I know that I sometimes drop the ball on correspondence about scheduling interviews, but when I've sent a person three or four emails following up on initial interest with proposed dates and time (or requests for a date/time convenient for the) and get no response back again and again (across multiple people), I have to start wondering if people view being on my podcast as a burden rather than a promotion opportunity. I know it's not true. And yet...

I skipped the yardwork on Thursday, in part because the green can is full and I'd need to find things to do that don't create waste. The lawn looks like it's ready for its second haircut of the year and that could probably pack in around the stuff already in the can, so maybe that will be today's task. My bum leg has been giving me annoyance during certain yardwork tasks because my right ankle has been really reminding me that it's weak and prone to turning. When pushing a lawnmower over rather lumpy ground on a variable slope, this is not a good thing. I end up having to step very carefully and mindfully. I don't tend to talk about my bum leg much except in passing references to my sciatica. In brief, after a number of years of aching-type sciatic nerve pain, back about 20 years ago something went *sproing* in my lower spine and pretty much grabbed my right sciatic nerve and gave it a good squeeze. Since then I've had diminished nerve function in that leg, though the amount of function is oddly variable. It manifests in numb patches on my outer calf and upper foot, weakness in my foot extension (I can't really stand on my right toe), a tendency to pronate unless I'm consciously keeping my foot aligned, periodic cramps in the calf (especially if I extend my foot in my sleep), and a measurable amount of muscle-wasting in the calf muscle. Back when it first happened I talked to Kaiser about it, got a lower back scan that didn't find anything obviously fixable, and more or less got told, "It's not bad enough for intervention because that might just make it worse." In everyday terms, it mostly just messes up my balance because that leg isn't very good at automatic minor adjustments and reactions to being slightly off-kilter, so if my center of balance goes in a direction that my right leg ought to react to correct, I'm likely to have to stagger a bit instead to keep my balance. I keep thinking I should check in with an orthopedist again about it, but it's one of those chronic things where it's hard to say what would push it over the edge into "doing something."

Well, that went interesting places.

I had some fun for dinner last night seeing what unexpected things I could do with stuff on hand. Taco salad! Who knew? The rest of the hamburger thawed out for the lasagna, onions, bell pepper all sauted together with some mixed seasoning that had a bit of garlic and chili in it. Over a bed of lettuce with a dollop of chili verde sauce (from a Christmas present of various salsas) and some plain yogurt in place of sour cream. Sprinkled over with fritos (from my box of assorted snack-size chips I picked up as treats). No guacamole, alas. 

 This year saw a bumper plum crop, mostly due to the timing and extent of the winter rains. (Lot of water means more fruit, but only if there's warming and a lack of storms during pollination time.) My standard method for consuming plums is to eat as many as I can fresh and turn the rest into frozen plum puree. (This gets mixed with yogurt for breakfasts during the rest of the year.) But I figured I'd try some other methods of preservation just for variety.

Dried plums - I have a forced-air food drier that sees useful duty when it's apple time. I have one of those spiral peeler-corer-slicer machines --thanks Randy! -- that makes the job simple. The apple slices dry in 24 hours, so during apple season I can get a lot processed with a one-hour session every evening. The plums, however, were not that efficient. If I had an efficient way of slicing them in half and pitting them, I might have been able to process a batch every day. But the variety I grow have very embedded pits and it would have been too messy. So they went in the drier whole which meant the moisture had to be drawn out through the skin. I finally judged them storage-safe after a week and a half. They're very tasty -- tart and flavorful -- though with a high pit-to-flesh ratio. They'll make a good "my mouth is bored" snack since it takes a while to work all the flesh off the pit. But this is not an efficient way of processing the crop. I might be able to get in at most three batches in the drier if I remember to start running it at the beginning of plum season. Worth doing again for the variety (especially since there's nothing else that needs the drier at that time of year).

Umeboshi -- And yes, I know that the "plums" used for proper umeboshi are actually more closely related to apricots than plums. But plums are what I had. I only did a test batch this year since I had no idea whether I'd like the result. I filled a quart mason jar with reasonably firm but ripe plums (these are the cherry-sized ones from my "ornamental" red-leaf tree), layered with salt at slightly less than 10% the weight of the plums. I probably could have used less because even as the moisture was drawn out of the plums, I always had undissolved salt present. I gently rotated the jar a couple times I day for about three weeks (the period recommended in the recipe I found). Today I removed them and placed them in the air dryer at the lowest setting and will check regularly until they seem to have dried enough that I'm not worried about them spoiling. The recipe indicates that they can be stored at room temperature in sealed bags and I'll probably try that with this test batch, though I worry that the summer heat in Concord may have different effects. I haven't tasted one yet, obviously. I should probably try a commercial umeboshi to have a sense of what I'm comparing to. The recipe also says you can strain the remaining brine for use as a seasoning. I tasted my fingers after transferring the plums to the dryer and mostly what I tasted was a saturated brine. But we'll see. If I were processing more than one jar, that's a lot of salt to use and a lot of brine to have left over, so it would make sense to find some additional use for it.

The tomatoes are coming in at a rate that I can keep up with for lunches currently. I hope I don't miss the best part of the season while I'm in Ireland but I'll have a house-sitter to take up the slack. I probably won't have enough tomatoes to have to preserve any, which is usually the case, but only because I eat them in such large quantities fresh!

After that, it'll be time to keep an eye of the apples, which are also having a bumper crop this year. Since they're still green when ripe, I need to look sharp to figure out when to start processing. The variety from my established tree is rather boring as eating apples, so they all get turned into sauce and dried slices. But I have several pre-1600 varieties starting to produce in experimental amounts. And the multi-variant graft that's supposed to be espaliered to the west wall of the house has maybe a dozen fruits this year, so there's that as well. The similarly espaliered multi-graft pear hasn't started bearing seriously yet but I can be patient.

I've been thinking of trying some new techniques with the small lemons in the backyard. (Since it bears year-round, mostly I just use them fresh, or occasionally slice-and-freeze to use in drinks.) Anyone have a favorite preservation recipe for small lemons? (Other than marmelade and candied peel, which I already do.)