A Grapefruit Miracle

 The sudden turn in pre-Thanksgiving temperatures caused not a small amount of havoc in my travel preparations this year. Before my small family of three felt safe leaving to visit relatives in Charlotte for a week, we staged what felt like a major military maneuver—watering plants, protecting pipes, and otherwise fortifying our home against the promised freeze.

A day before we left, the pandemonium ramped up when I realized that our precious grapefruit harvest was also in jeopardy.

My husband and I own a rental house in Baton Rouge graced by a bountiful grapefruit tree. With no special effort, attention, or nurturing (my kind of flora), this grapefruit tree regularly provides us with hundreds of almost-cantaloupe-sized grapefruits every Christmas. The tree literally droops with the fruit. It is an amazing, generous, scurvy-preventing gift that, without fail, supplies us with a year's worth of the sweetest grapefruit you have ever tasted.

For someone raised far from any agrarian matter-of-factness, these grapefruits are a hands-down miracle. They aren't the prettiest grapefruit you've ever seen—remember, I don't do a lick of maintenance on the poor buggers, so the tree limps through the humid summer, leaves and fruit attracting colonies of pests: spotted spider mites (which create telltale webs across the fruit and leaves), mealybugs, aphids, scales and the like whose excretions encourage the growth of thick mats of sooty mold. All of this, by the way, I learned about in a very handy "all you need to know about growing citrus in South Louisiana" (not the actual title) document produced by the LSU AgCenter.

From this informative treatise, I also learned that sooty mold does not penetrate the tissue of the fruit and in no way damages the fruit (or the people who eat the mold, which we have inevitably done despite giving the fruit a good scrubbing before use). But the mold can prove debilitating to the plant in that it hinders photosynthesis by blocking exposure to the sun.

I've never minded the mold; all it has meant to me is that these grapefruit are extremely organic. But LSU tells me that my grapefruit tree and all its citrus brethren are, at the least, at risk of producing less-than-the-best tasting fruit and, at the worst, death.

I'd be advised to read (and follow) this booklet so that my son is assured his share of the bounty in the future. But then … it wouldn't be a Christmas miracle anymore, would it?