Florida has a lot of oranges

Everywhere we go we see orange groves.  Something you don't see up north.  We went geocaching the other day and we were in the midst of several orange groves.  The trees are loaded with oranges.  Although they are picking them so some of the trees are bare.

The other things you see are trucks taking the oranges to market.

We also saw people picking the oranges.    I look at that tub and it looks like it takes an awful lot of oranges to fill it up.                                                                                                                            

We came across what we thought were baby oranges but yet we really didn't think they were.  So we weren't sure what it was.

So do you know what they are?

Well we didn't until we came upon a guy who we named Rancher Rick.  He owned some of the orange groves where we were at.  He also had these on his property.



This was for 2 families



Inside the building, one apartment



The other half

Obviously, no one is living here but I tried to imagine  someone living here.  We were checking them out and Rancher Rick came down to see what we were doing. 

So back to the small oranges.  Rick told us they were mandarin oranges, the little oranges you buy in a can.  So did you know?  We didn't.

 We learned a lot about orange trees.  We have wild orange trees behind us in the park.  The oranges are very bitter and have very long thorns.  Rick told us that orange trees that are not native to Florida can not stand all the rain that Florida gets.  So they start out with a native orange tree and when it gets to a certain height they graft in a different kind of orange tree.  When you look at all the orange groves down here that's a lot of grafting. 

We are still in Wauchula, Florida.  We have changed parks but we still have Peace River behind us.  We are in Pioneer Co. Park.

  They are getting ready for Pioneer Days.  It will last a week and will have about 400 vendors coming in.  We would like to be here but are heading to Orlando.

Happy Trails.    Love Ed and Lyn