Oranges Galore!

I have an orange tree in my yard. Let's call him Caesar (See what I did there? No? You don't follow my convoluted naming logic? Orange tree -> Orange Julius -> Julius Caesar -> Caesar the Orange Tree. Shut up, it makes sense to me.). Below is a picture of Caesar on Saturday morning.

It's a little hard to see here, but he had a lot of fruit. He's also got a lot of dead spots :/ So much so that I've been worried about him. I would say about half of the foliage is now dead (it's worse in the back). Caesar has been neglected because, while yes, I'll claim him, I rent the house that I'm living in and he technically sits right between my house and my neighbor's house. So not only is it questionable which house he belongs to, probably if it does belong to my house my landlord should actually be taking care of him. Regardless, he's being neglected and if the 8 months I've been waiting for my window to get fixed, 4 months for the screen door and 3 months for the stove burner are any indication, I don't really have time to wait for the landlord to come through on this one.

Last weekend I took a couple of pictures and leaf samples to the Marina del Rey Garden Center and they advised me to prune and fertilize Caesar, like a lot. I bought some iron supplement from them and in reading the directions it mentioned that you shouldn't apply it to trees with fruit on them. Oh. So Saturday morning I got out the orange picker and a couple of bags and went outside.  Three and a half full bags later I had all the orange fruit off the tree, and I was tired. That's a LOT of oranges folks!

I had planned to keep going and pull off all the green fruit and prune the tree that day as well, but it became clear to me during the picking how hard the pruning would be. I need a ladder and some heavy duty shears. Or I need a professional tree service to come out. I haven't decided which yet, but I'm leaning toward paying someone to do that work for me. Regardless, all I did for the orange project for the rest of the day was give the oranges a bath.

Note, that's only half of them pictured here. And yes, I know you don't have to clean the outside of oranges, thanks very much, but they were really dirty and I didn't feel right handing dirty fruit out to my friends. Anyway, this will be a continuing project. Here's hoping I don't accidentally kill Caesar!