Grapefruit

Microbes were naturally in the soil before industrial agriculture stripped them out (fertilizer, tillage and pesticides). They break down the minerals already present in the ground and make it available for plants, all plants. Think of the trees in the forest… they don’t need fertilizer and barely any pest control. When they make all the nutrients available that a plant could ever need, the plant is full of all the enzymes, hormones, proteins, etc. – bursting with them. Likewise, their fruit is full of this nutrition and passes it on to us. See our blog “Hollow Food” for a detailed explanation.

Squeeze Citrus is a small, meticulously managed grove that requires a careful hands-on approach in caring for our fruit. Our Organic and Regenerative practices are labor-intensive and time-consuming. We apply natural nutrition every two weeks, and we hand weed and mow around each tree because we don’t use chemical herbicides. This approach leads to healthier trees, but they grow more slowly, which means our harvests are delayed by at least a year and produce less fruit overall.

Managing a regenerative grove requires much more hands-on effort—what we do on our small grove could manage 3-4 times the acreage of a conventional grove using chemicals. However, the payoff is in the quality: our fruit is far more nutrient-dense, often 5 to 10 times richer in nutrients than conventionally grown fruit. This is why our citrus may cost more, but the value in terms of health benefits and environmental impact is significantly higher.

It’s not weeds like you might think.  Those are “cover crops” - varieties chosen for certain characteristics and planted everywhere intentionally.  Every plant, including cover crops, exude (secrete) up to 40% of all the sugars they produce out into the soil to feed the microbes!  This is the natural system – creation. A beautiful cycle is generated: sun’s energy > cover crops > microbes > tree > fruit > You!

A loaded question. I (Herb) spent my whole career in the pesticide industry doing everything from field testing new chemicals all the way to marketing. We always did what farmers demanded: “Get us something to kill these pests!”  Most people in the pesticide industry believe they are helping the farmers grow food to feed you.  We didn’t know the damage we were causing. Only when I decided to become a grower myself did I do the research and discover that an entire ecosystem in the soil was being destroyed by industrial agriculture.  I made a drastic change and had a lot to learn but it has been incredibly rewarding.  And the result has been amazing nutrient dense fruit that is 3X, 5X, 10X more nutritious and more!

All citrus bloom first thing in the spring and then it takes all year to grow fruit.  Each variety takes a little different length of time. Some varieties, like grapefruit, can take over a year for the fruit to mature – that means you can have almost ripe fruit and new blooms together on the same tree. Some varieties ripen on the tree and need to be picked at an exact time, others (grapefruit again) can hold on the tree for months and be picked when it’s convenient for us or when you order. Our biggest threat in South Georgia is a freeze.  We try to harvest between Nov. 15th and the end of January to avoid February and March freezes which might ruin the fruit.

Each of those states has declared themselves a “Citrus Producing State.” To protect their own citrus industry from diseases being brought in on fruit or trees, nothing can be brought into those states without complete sterilization.  It is monitored by the USDA and called a “Quarantine.”