Orange You Glad to See This

Aug. 24, 2010 - PRLog -- Florida is known as the home of Mickey Mouse but not many know that before it being known as the house of Mickey and his friends, it was known as a

Orlando was a simple town that has sparkling lakes, pine forests and citrus groves so there is a reason why this is called the Orange County.  Today many of the Groves have yielded to the many high rise apartments and shopping complexes but the alluring scent of the orange blossom still wafts through the air in spring.  But winter is the time when part of the orange county lives up to its name with a sea of the golden fruit nestling against the dark green leaves to feast the eye and the more importantly your taste buds.

If you think about it many take it for granted that we can enjoy the fresh tree ripened citrus when we are no where near the State of Florida but it was always like that.  Only people living near the Florida groves could buy the fruit when they were growing it over 150 years ago.  As shipping the fruit north was a tedious journey, first you had to load the horse drawn wagons and then carry them by barge up to the Ocklawaha River to the St. John's River where it needs to be reloaded onto steamboats.  Then the Boats will sail up the Atlantic coast delivering fruit to ports along the way as far as New York where the fruit were a luxury.  Delivering the oranges to the ports also helped them ship the fruit to other countries.

The railway offered a solution to this because once the tracks were extended to the western side of the orange lake  it allowed for freight trains to carry crates of citrus north in a matter of days.  Growing of the fruit were doing well until one of Florida's notorious killer freezes hit the crop in the 1890s.  Over the years there were a series of freezes that had wiped out many groves which forced many of the commercial farmers to pick up sticks and head further south or plain well give up.

Although this wiped out many growers, the juice of orange still ran through their families veins.  When there were no more citrus, some switched to shipping gift fruit.  Families would send a taste of Florida in the form of gift baskets around the country, these would feature oranges, grapefruit and tangerines.

Citrus County in the north western Florida is named that because of its shady groves of citrus.  Today though it isn't rated as a centre for the citrus industry.  Ironically you'd think that Orange County would be the area of Florida where a lot of oranges are grown but it isn't in fact 20 other counties grow more than the Orange County.  Florida citrus varies in range from grapefruit, oranges, tangerines, mandarins to lemons, limes and kumquats.  Florida produces a small amount of lemons but grows the most limes in the United State so many you would like to try some key lime pie at throughout the Florida keys or some good olé orange juice at one of the various Orlando vacation rentals.

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