Holding hands

Meet another one of our many fruit trees - Citrus medica (var. sarcodactylis) known as the Fingered Citron or Buddha's Hand.

Today I held these two tiny Buddha's Hands in mine.   If the tree is watered and tended well we can expect each one to grow much larger than my hand and to ripen to a lemony yellow. 

This is a fascinating citrus variety that we have grown more for its novelty value than any particular usefulness.  There are photos of the bizarre-looking mature fruit here and here.

For more information and ideas on how they may be used I went to the Chinese food site Flavour and Fortune where I learned this:

• For over a millennium, the Chinese and Japanese have prized the bizarre Buddha's Hand Citron, which looks like a cross between a giant lemon and a squid, and can perfume a room for weeks with its mysterious fragrance. Normal citrons (Citrus medica L.) resemble big, rough lemons, their thick yellow rinds often used for candying. A hybrid, though some say a mutant form of this citrus, the Buddha's Hand (var. sarcodactylis), splits longitudinally at the end opposite the stem into segments that look remarkably like long thin gnarled human fingers. Some of the many more popular names for this oval-shaped fruit that can be as long at 200 millimeters include Five Finger Mandarin (wu zhi gan), Fragrant Citron (xian yuan), and Fingered Citron (zhi yuan).

Here you can find the full article including some exotic recipes.

Since our young tree is still barely 3 feet high and there are another two buds higher up, we may have to sacrifice some of the fruit this year to ensure that the tree continues to thrive.

Comments

[pablo]

That's some wacky fruit.

[kenju]

I saw that in a store once and had no idea what it was. Thanks.