Reality Sets In

I wish I could say that's it, the whole story, Voilla!!!, now I'm happily living in the city, dropping by to admire my grove every so often, and raking in the money selling satsumas by the carload.

I overlooked the part where trees have to get from little one-foot stalks with a couple of leaves on the top to those big, lush, glorious trees covered with fruit.  The poor little things!  When I picked them up from the nursery, not only were they poor, it was bloody freezing and it had been dumping rain for weeks so the ground was one huge frozen on and off mud puddle.  It then proceeded to vary between freezing cold and dumping rain the entire winter.  By the time the weather dried out (too late in the year to put them in the ground anyway) it jumped to average daily temperatures of 95 degrees and stayed that way all summer.  They spent their first year in the same nursery pots they came in.  All two hundred of them! In my brothers truck shed which we turned into a greenhouse by replacing the roof with fiberglass panels.  "Patty, I'd like you to meet Mr. Weather."

By then it was 2013.  And despite it all, they grew!  By the following season when they first had the opportunity to spread their little roots in some real dirt, they weretwo feet tall and leafy and strong -- some of them even bloomed in the greenhouse.

I knew they we were going to become good friends.