Grapefruit Tree

I’ve written about this before, but here’s an update. Over forty years ago, our son Michael took a seed from a Florida grapefruit he was eating and put it in with one of my wife’s kitchen plants. When it sent up a tiny shoot, Rosalie was about to pull it, thinking it was a weed. Mike explained what it was and she transplanted it and we watched it grow over the years as a house plant in our living room. And when we retired to Arizona, we brought it along with us, and I planted it in our back yard, where it grew and grew into what we now have, a tree nearly twenty feet tall. It didn’t blossom for at least four years, but then one spring I saw a few blossoms which later became a few grapefruit, which weren’t very good, pithy, small, and white inside instead of pink. A few more years went by, a few more fruit appeared but were still not edible. My daughter from Kentucky paid us a visit recently and said she wanted to try one of Mike’s grapefruit. She picked one and cut it open. Voila! A pink grapefruit that was juicy and delicious. And it took only forty years. We picked the few remaining fruit, eating some, giving some to son Michael. Now we can’t wait for next spring to see if we get the same pink grapefruit in greater numbers.

Here’s the tree as it now stands in our backyard.

And here’s a picture of our cat Tiger that my daughter took and then superimposed onto one half of our pink grapefruit. Isn’t he cute? Doesn’t the grapefruit look wonderful? Don’t you wish you could grow your own grapefruit tree from a seed? Well, you can. But you better be prepared to wait at least forty years before you can eat any of your bounty.