When Life Gives You Lemons...

...make Lemonade. Literally.

We are super lucky to have a Meyer lemon tree in our backyard, about the only good thing we inherited from this house and the previous owners. In keeping with our weekend landscaping theme, Chris and I decided to trim, mulch, and pick a TON of lemons from our lemon tree.

Meyer lemons are WONDERFUL because they are super juicy, a bit sweeter, and fruit all year long. We haven't taken full advantage of them since we've moved in over a year ago, so we made up for it this last weekend

We picked...and picked....and picked lemons

And after about 20-30 minutes of picking we ended up with 3 bucketfulls

And we only picked about 1/3 to 1/2 of the lemons that were on the tree

After, we grabbed our buckets and hauled them inside to wash and cut

After lots of washing and lots of cutting, we had A LOT of lemons to juice

And while Chris used the handy dandy juicer, we whipped up a little juicing contraption for me (my bare hands, into a pasta strainer, into a bowl. I know, super fancy)

Once we had squeezed all of our bowlfulls of lemons, we had A LOT of juice to make lemonade from

(that's ALL juice!)

Next, it was time to get out another pitcher and mix up some lemonade! So we put in some water, ice cubes and sugar

Did a couple of taste tests, you know, just to MAKE SURE it tasted perfect

And it was mighty tasty!

Now we've got enough lemon juice to make us lemonade for a few MONTHS! And next time we mix a batch, we'll measure how much juice we use in it, that way we can measure out that much into small ziploc bags and toss them in the freezer, so each time we make a new batch from then on we'll just toss in the large, frozen, lemon juice ice cube and some water and sugar and be good to go!

Tasty lemonade = summertime!!! (now if only the weather would decide to stay consistently warm, I'm not liking all this rain business)