I have been in love with lemon trees for a very long time, but being far from gifted in dealing with plants (I'm known as a 'brown thumb' over here), I never gave in to the temptation to buy one.

Till this spring, that is, when I first bought a young lemon tree at the supermarket  (it's just 4 euros after all) and later, during one of my adventure trips with mother at a local garden center she was an active accomplice in choosing another lemon tree to keep company to the first (this one has a good shape and some fruits already on...) .
In fact fruits were there, and stayed on, growing all summer, while we were watching the two baby trees like hawks for signs of disconfort and reading all we could about the citrus family.



As time passed we realized that the two trees, although evidently related, were too different to be two cultivars of the same fruit, and that the 'lemons' on the older tree were getting rounder and rounder and suspiciously similar to...oranges.

Not sure of the right time for harvesting (thanks to the wrong nursery photo-ID), yesterday we had the first orange from our very own tree



The zest had a wonderful smell (we kept it for later use), the flesh was ripe and pleasantly tart, and the fruit was quite easy to peel.

I'm happy to say that both trees are thriving, maybe I'm not so hopelessy brown-thumbed, after all ;-).