When it comes to buying bags of birdseed, peanuts are a common ingredient. Blue jays love them. Squirrels do, too. While I am not sure what blue jays do when they fly away with peanuts, I have observed some squirrel behavior.
Squirrels like to bury them. Sometimes, when those peanuts are buried in the right place, they sprout before the squirrel remembers where it had stashed them. A green shoot breaks through the surface, rises and does the best it can to build a little plant. Sometimes, the dimpled brown case holding the nut sticks out of the ground, too, making it easy to identify the sprout as a peanut plant.
When a squirrel stashed one in a terra cotta planter in the backyard, I watered it. It grew and grew and yielded a small crop of 25 peanuts that looked just like peanuts – some held a single nut and some two. I did plant one or two of the peanuts and harvested one smaller, additional crop. I have planted other, more traditional Keys crops, too.
Two years ago, I planted two pineapple crowns. I cut both from pineapples purchased at the Tavernier Winn-Dixie, where I have shopped for more than 25 years.
After all this time, these are the first two to have ever taken off. The first pineapple was harvested on July 4, and though small, it was sweet and delicious.
The point about the peanut and pineapple is that each produced what was expected: a peanut and a pineapple. In contrast, a tree growing out in the yard has a similar origin but an altogether different story to tell.
We moved into our Plantation Key home in 2012. It is a small two-bedroom house with a single bathroom and a front porch that used to be screened in. After moving in, we occasionally found Key limes on the porch. Sometimes it was two or three, and sometimes there would be a small brown paper bag filled with the little yellow fruits.
We were anonymously treated to a relatively steady supply of Key limes; it was an amazing welcome to the neighborhood. At first, we didn’t know who was delivering them. “The Key lime fairy stopped by,” we would say to each other. They are brilliant to cook with and lovely when squeezed into a tumbler of rum. Twice, pies were attempted.
It didn’t take long to meet the neighbors with the tree. Now, we share most Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners with them. Their Key lime tree had been a prolific producer for more than two decades and, years ago, when it started to decline, I planted some seeds. I walked over to their yard, picked up a handful of ripe limes that had fallen to the ground, and brought them home – of course, I had permission.
I used two of the limes to make salsa and squeezed them over a bowl of freshly diced tomato, onion and jalapeno. The seeds were collected in the palm of my hand. Nine or 10 of those seeds were planted in small pots filled with soil; that was seven or eight years ago. Not all of them sprouted. Two have grown into trees.
One grows in our yard and the other in the neighbor’s yard across the street. They are wildly different trees. The tree growing in their yard is stunted and still not even knee-high.
It fruited several years ago; though the limes were small, they were the right color – yellow on the outside and that sublime shade of yellowish green on the inside. The other tree is in our yard; in many regards, it is everything that one is not.
After years in various pots, we put the Key lime tree in the ground and it blossomed. Two summers later, the tree is nearly 6 feet tall and is full of branches and leaves. Back in March, it erupted in little white-petaled lime flowers. There were hundreds of the little blooms; their scent permeated that corner of the yard as bees stuck their noses into every bud they could. Some of the flowers’ stamens fattened into tiny green fruits. Some died and fell off. Six months later, nearly 20 limes were weighing down some of the tree’s limbs. They grew into ping-pong-ball-sized fruits, deep green at first, then yellowing beautifully as they ripened.
A few limes have fallen to the ground, have been picked up, and sliced open on the wooden cutting board. The revelation was peculiar, and if I didn’t know exactly where the seed came from that grew into this tree, I’d be skeptical if it were indeed a Key lime. The first curious development that makes me question its Key limeness is that the tree growing in the front yard from the seed of a bona fide Key lime is thornless.
The trees on the other side of the street, both the one that dropped the fruit from which these seeds were taken, and the other surviving tree growing from the seeds I planted, had long, sharp thorns growing out of the branches. The second curious development is the fruit. After waiting for years for the tree to bear fruit, what has fallen off the tree is atypical. The fruit’s smell, taste, and color are off.
While they look like Key limes on the outside, they lack those distinctive lime hallmarks. When you scratch the skin with a fingernail, they give off a less-than-lime scent. When sliced open, the pulpy flesh inside isn’t that slightly green Key lime color, but lemon yellow. The “limes” smell and taste like lemon, too, and what appears to be the case is that the Key lime tree grown from the seed of a Key lime is producing Key lemons.
I’ve shared the fruit with multiple neighbors, and the same report comes back: lemons. It will be interesting to see what happens when I plant some new seeds and see what comes to fruition.
