HARVEST CITRUS

Grapefruit, lime, lemon and kumquats produce plentiful flowers over the year, most of them in winter. If the conditions are right, 12 months later they produce fresh, tasty fruit. Apart from kumquats, thinning a 1m (3¼ft) tall plant to around 20 fruit will give you a better harvest. You can recognise a ripe fruit by its rich skin colour. Pull the fruit stalk off the tree or, if that’s difficult, cut it off with secateurs or scissors. But if you want to enjoy them for a while or simply don’t want to harvest them all at once, you can leave them on the tree a bit longer.