Landscaping: Why pay $20 a kilo?

Green limes are best used as a garnish. When they're fat and yellow, they're ready for juicing.

Call me naive, but I can never understand why limes fetch $20 a kilo. It's not as if they're difficult to grow. I can, however, understand why capsicums are expensive most of the time, because I have a dreadful time getting them past babyhood and, if I do, they go mushy before they reach puberty. So I'm resigned to paying $1.99 each for those.

But limes? No way. You just stick in a lime tree, it grows, it makes flowers, it makes limes, you pick them and hey - margaritas! Honest. We have half a dozen organic lime trees and, despite their being neglected since I became their mother in 1998, they soldier on year after year, making more limes than we could ever use. Needless to say, we're especially popular with friends and neighbours.

Ours are Tahitian limes and, to my way of thinking, they're the perfect tree because, unlike me, they're multi-taskers. They're evergreen so they look great all year round. If you have to chop off dead or damaged wood, it grows back in a nanosecond. They produce gorgeous, fragrant white flowers mainly in the spring (although ours do it randomly) and you have to stop yourself from plunging your face into them (there are thorns) for a head-spinning whiff. And from here on in they'll produce gorgeous, heavily scented green fruit which turns yellow as it ripens.

There's nothing I like more than walking through the garden in the late afternoon and picking limes for gin and tonic. The scent is as intoxicating as the gin, and the culinary opportunities are numerous. The juice and zest enhance the flavour of potatoes, salads, rice and cooked vegetables, and if you use lime you can use less salt and fat. Then there are marinades, salad dressings, guacamole, seafood and barbecue sauces, stews, sorbets, jams and jellies. And pies. And lime curd.

Tahitian limes do well in subtropical areas so I can't take all the credit for getting such good crops. However, I can take some for supplying (not personally) hen manure, which for several years was delivered fresh daily by our chooks, which liked to roost among the limes. The trees they favoured for their sleepovers did about twice as well as the others. These days we don't have chooks so I feed them a citrus fertiliser two or three times a year, prune them about once a decade, and praise them lavishly for their superb contribution to our diet.

They like a sunny, sheltered spot, against a north-facing wall where there'll be reflected heat is a good choice. Happily, limes don't just grow in subtropical areas so there's no reason you can't grow one further south.

Bearss limes originated in California as a seedling of the Tahitian, and they're said to be much hardier to frost than the Tahitian, very reliable in their fruit set, and heavy croppers. The fruit are good looking, thin skinned and virtually seedless, and are borne on trees just 2 or 3 years old. They crop from June until August, in November and in February and March. Sounds like a good deal to me.

Another one that's reasonably cold resistant but still a bit frost tender is the Kusaie lime, which has a particularly intense flavour. It's another good cropper, with a main crop in summer and more throughout the year.

Citrus, I'm saddened to report, are promiscuous in the extreme. They'll hook up with each other at the drop of a hat, which makes it difficult to know exactly how many natural species there were originally. There may have been as few as four, with the rest being natural or man-made hybrids. And speaking of hybrids, how about a cross between a lime and a kumquat? It's called a limequat and makes regular, heavy crops of oval-shaped, lemon-coloured fruit that are juicy, acidic and full of vitamin C. And no pips! It'll be happy in the sun, provided the soil is well drained.

It's easy to indulge yourself with limes and have a garden full of different varieties. With a bit of planning, you could have fruit just about all year round. But what would be the fun in that? You'd miss the thrill of the first limes on the trees, and that first gin and lime of the season.

A sublime little tree

The smallest lime tree in our garden is about 800mm tall and I don't think it's ever produced fruit. But who cares? Kaffir limes are grown for their leaves, not the miserable, warty, hard little limes that appear from time to time.

It's not a lush, gorgeous, ornamental tree, but if you like Asian and Indonesian flavours, the Kaffir lime leaf is a vital ingredient.

They can be used fresh or dried, and can be stored frozen. The leaves are widely used in Thai and Lao cuisine and in Vietnamese cuisine to add fragrance to chicken dishes. And if you're in the habit of steaming snails, you can add the leaves to decrease the pungent odour while cooking.

The word "Kaffir" is a derogatory term in some cultures, so if you prefer not to use it, there are plenty of alternatives. The Oxford Companion to Food recommends makrut lime, but if you feel like a challenge, try the proper name, Citrus hystrix. Just have a few practises before you say it in public.