Use This Tool When Picking Citrus Fruit To Help It Last Longer After Harvest

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There are few things more rewarding than starting your own edible garden. Having fresh ingredients within easy reach will have you incorporating more produce into every meal. It's healthy, tasty, and satisfying to know you grew everything yourself. Citrus is especially worthwhile. Not only are citrus fruits delicious, fragrant, and packed with vitamins and nutrients, but they're also versatile. Snack on them, add them to salads, juice them, cook with them, bake with them, zest them for seasoning, use their peels for cocktail garnishes — there are so many ways to use different varieties of oranges plus grapefruit, lemons, satsumas, tangerines, etc. It's also a-peel-ing — pardon the pun — how long citrus fruits like oranges can last: about a week at room temperature, and a whole month refrigerated. That's only if you harvest your citrus properly, though.

When you go through the work of growing your own citrus fruits, you don't want that to go to waste because your oranges or lemons were plucked off of their stems, which can rip their peels and hasten its drying out and spoiling. It's essential to use a pair of garden pruning shears. You don't need much, but you do definitely want to leave a bit of stem attached to the fruit, which ensures its skin remains entirey intact. If a citrus fruit's skin tears, it quickly begins to lose its moisture and its fruit simultaneously becomes susceptible to oxygen and bacteria that will cause it to rot faster.

Consider this: The best way to keep lemons fresh is leaving them whole and refrigerating them. The most reliable solutions for storing oranges? Ditto. Citrus fruit thrives before it's cut into, as soon as it is exposed to air, it both dries out and goes bad so much faster. When you do want to store cut citrus fruit, it's a must to wrap it and then place it in an airtight container to keep it fresh for a few days. Remember this level of protection when picking these fruit off of its tree.

When you don't use clippers to harvest your citrus fruits, you can also do long-term damage to the tree itself — so, you're not only limiting the shelf life of the currently ripe fruit, but also the size and health of future harvests. When you twist citrus fruits to pluck them off of their branches, you can rip bark and smaller twigs that would otherwise grow to bear fruit in future seasons. 

Citrus trees can be great beginner-friendly varieties of fruit trees, you just need to pay attention to the details — a twist and pluck can seem so simple but can sabotage your harvest. Invest in clippers — these Kynup pruning shears are just $10 on Amazon — and reap the rewards for seasons to come. You'll have fruit that stays fresh for weeks, and healthy trees that keep bearing gorgeous fruit.