On Friday B and I harvested lemons off the small meyer lemon tree that is living on our front porch right now. It lived in the garden all summer and Jeff brought it in when the weather grew colder. I know I’ve shared about our little lemon harvests here before, but the excitement never wears off for me that we are really harvesting our own lemons! And I couldn’t help but to think: “We’re harvesting lemons in December! How cool is that?” (If we had waited just a few more days it would have been lemons in January!)

Every time we harvest them I feel like we need to do something special with our lemons, but we didn’t do anything fancy- we just made some lemon water. That was fancy enough for us (especially after B insisted we put the lemon rounds on the sides of our glasses “like they do in restaurants”) and since B got a touch of that cold I had, the Vitamin C was appreciated. Fresh lemon juice in water is a favorite around here, and we enjoy it even more when we’ve grown the lemons ourselves. They smell so good! The meyer lemons have a different flavor than the lemons we usually get from the store, so the lemon water we make with them is less tart and not quite what we’re used to, but still enjoyed greatly.

Oh, and some advice from a now six-year-old? If you have any owies and you don’t want the lemon juice to get on your hands, then just use a spoon to remove the seeds. Ta-da!

P.S. We didn’t want to waste a thing with our precious lemons, so we soaked the rinds in vinegar to make spray cleaner. The directions say to let them soak for two weeks, but we soaked ours for less because I was all out of spray cleaner and we had used the last of the cleaning vinegar for soaking the lemons in. We strained the vinegar, mixed it with water, and put it in a spray bottle. I use vinegar and water in a spray bottle all the time for cleaning, but having the citrus scent is really nice, especially in the winter time. (My friend Nicole has directions at the end of her blog post here.)