Today turned out gorgeous after three solid days of rain so I went out to get some photos for Mike's December Photos. My science background got the better of me but some might enjoy seeing some different citrus fruit and I'll share my impression of their flavors too.

So here are the fruit and they are all ripe right now. The lemons are at their ripening peak, the satsumas are on the tail end of their season, the kumquats, tangerine, and blood orange are just now getting ripe...and that would be for my SE Texas region. Calamondins will produce fruit year-round if it's warm enough and it's the only citrus I have that will have ripe or green fruit on it year round if I get a mild winter.

I decided to slice them open so here they are again...

Of course I had to sample them and ultimately compared seed counts since some here discuss seeded and seedless varieties.

The blood orange is a delicious fruit and really has a blood red meat when it's good and ripe from a mature tree. They are very sweet, not too seedy, quite juicy, but a little hard to peel. The peel is bitter.

The Satsuma orange is also a very tasty fruit, is really easy to peel, is very sweet, is almost seedless, and the peel is a little bitter but not so much it wouldn't be good in marmalade.

The Dancy tangerine is easy to peel, it is just a tad more tart than the Satsuma but also very sweet, quite juicy, has a lot more seeds than the Satsuma, and has a bitter peel.

The kumquat is gone from the last photo because I ate the whole fruit. There is a sour kumquat which is football shaped. Mine is the sweet version and the fruit is round, not elongated like the sour kumquat. The peel is sweet with a bit of an oily bite right when you bite into it. The meat is sweet but has a tart finish so I describe eating a kumquat as a three-stage experience. That would be a characteristic of a fine wine right? Kumquats have about seven seeds, and very little juice but can be pure'd in a blender for pies.

The calamondin can easily be peeled but the peel is the sweetest part and is best eaten with the rest of the fruit which is almost as sour as a lemon. It has a strong flavor that is difficult to compare with other citrus. It will be almost to strong for jelly (Laura LaRosa made some fine looking marmalade with some though) but works fine in pies, and mixes great with other citrus juices and ice. It can be substituted 1:1 in recipes calling for lemon juice.

The meyer lemon (drawing from my very limited experience with one young tree and from Johnmerr's extensive experience he has shared with us here) is considered one of the best tasting and highest producing lemons in terms of numbers and percentage juice yield. They peel easier than a blood orange but not as easy as a tangerine. The juice is more sour than the calamondin but I didn't think it was as sour as the Ponderosa. I think I blew out my taste buds taste-testing the lemons and the calamondin :>) The meyer had 14 seeds and the peel, as Johnmerr has said, is not at all bitter.

The Ponderosa lemon is a huge fruit and can yield a cup of juice from a single lemon but the percent yield by weight and probably by volume isn't as high as the meyer. The Ponderosa has a thick bitter peel that has a fantastic lemony aroma when bruised, the meat is very sour, and it is extremely seedy. The Ponderosa above had a whopping 57 seeds!