Oranges and lemons

December to July 144 trees

If you only want the short version: oranges from early December to July depending on the variety, lemons more or less all year, and the bitter oranges for two or three weeks in January.

What is planted

There are 118 orange trees and 26 lemon trees on three terraces, running roughly east to west so the rows get sun from mid morning. Fifty five of the orange trees standing now were already here when we took the place on. We do not know exactly how old they are. The trunks suggest forty years or more, and the spacing is wider than anyone would plant today, which tells you they went in before mechanical anything.

• Newhall, 24 trees. The earliest we have. Navel orange, seedless, sweet and slightly soft. First fruit ready in early December.
• Navelina, 18 trees. Also a navel, a week or two behind Newhall, holds on the tree better.
• Lane Late, 32 trees. A late navel that we start on at the end of February and pick through to May.
• Valencia Late, 38 trees. The last and the best juicing orange. May through July, and in a good year we are still picking in the second week of July.
• Bitter orange, six trees. Laranja amarga, inedible raw, and the whole reason there is marmalade in the pantry. Two of these came with the plot and four we planted in 2019.
• Lemons, 26 trees. Fourteen Eureka and twelve of the four seasons type that flowers more or less continually. Between them we have lemons in most months, though the winter fruit is much better than the summer fruit.

We have not planted anything new in the citrus block since 2022. The trees that are here are as many as the water will carry in a dry year, and we would rather have 144 trees we can irrigate properly than 200 we cannot.

When it comes in

The Algarve gives you a long citrus season, which is the main advantage of growing here. Newhall and Navelina come in from the first week of December and are done by the end of January. Lane Late picks up at the end of February and runs to early May. Valencia Late overlaps with it and carries through to July. The bitter oranges are the exception: they colour in January, we take the whole crop in two or three sessions, and that is that for the year.

Lemons do not really have a season here so much as a rhythm. The main flush colours from November to March and those are the ones worth having, thick skinned, heavy, sharp. The summer lemons are thinner and less juicy and mostly go into the kitchen rather than into jars.

How we pick it

By hand, with clippers, cutting the stalk flush rather than pulling. Pulling a navel orange off the tree tears a plug out of the skin and that fruit will rot within the week. It takes longer to teach someone to cut properly than it does to teach them anything else about picking, and it is the one thing we are fussy about on the orange picking mornings.

Fruit goes into a picking bag over the shoulder, then into 20 kilo crates in the shade at the end of the row. We do not pick into sun. Fruit that sits in a crate in full sun for two hours in March is noticeably worse by the time it reaches the kitchen. The crates come up to the packing bench the same day, get looked over, and anything split, marked or soft goes straight into the juice bucket.

Bitter oranges are picked separately and used the same week. They do not keep and the pectin in them is best when the fruit is just coloured rather than fully soft. That is why the marmalade is made in one long stretch in January and February and not at any other point in the year.

What a bad year looks like

2025 was a bad year and it is worth being plain about what that means. We had 318 millimetres of rain in the whole 2024 to 2025 season against a long term average nearer 520. The winter rain came late and in two heavy bursts, which runs off the terraces rather than soaking in. Then June arrived with four days over 40 degrees.

The effect on citrus is not that the trees die. They do not, they are tougher than that. What happens is that the June drop, which is normal and healthy, keeps going into July. Fruit that stays on is smaller and the skin gets thicker and coarser, because the tree puts what water it has into the rind rather than the flesh. We picked about a third less Valencia in 2025 than in 2023, and what we picked was a size grade down. Marmalade fruit was fine, because a thick skin does not matter when you are shredding the peel anyway.

The other thing a dry year does is push the following season around. Trees that were stressed in summer flower unevenly the next spring, so a bad year is really a bad eighteen months. That is what we are watching now.

Where the fruit ends up

Most of the orange crop is sold fresh or juiced locally and never appears on this site. What does appear here is the preserved end of it: Bitter orange marmalade from the six bitter orange trees in January, and Lemon curd made in small runs through the winter when the lemons are at their best. Neither is made all year, and when a batch is gone it is gone until the next season.

If you want to see the block rather than read about it, the Orange picking morning runs on Saturday mornings in January. It is the same work we would be doing anyway.