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["Donna &/or Kieran" <holycow@cookeville.com>]

I would not recommend that anyone grow trifoliate orange for a lemon substitute.  It has extremely nasty tasting stuff in it's rind, and though most of that doesn't get into the juice, it sticks to your juicer permanently.  The fruit are so jam packed full of seeds that there is very little juice to be had, and the seedlings that come up are extremely thorny.  The adult fruiting trees have deadly long sharp thorns themselves. 

    I was quite thrilled with the Chaenomeles quince "Toyo Nishiki" which used to grow at TTU as I could go over and pick fruit every year.  Richard Moyer says he uses one of those vacuam juicers on his, I just grated them up to put in jams or dishes I wanted sour.  The shrubs are lovely in spring, so I finally got one of my own.  I've gotten suspicious that we don't see more fruit on the big old quince bushes people's front yards because of lack of cross pollination, so I've planted some seedlings too.   

    Tech has taken their quinces out, but we aren't getting fruit yet.  Our place is crawling with cedars.  Quince rust seems to be a big problem in such situations, though I read that hawthorn is a worse culprit in spreading it to the cedars than quince is.  In case any of you have the chestnut crab, it is apparently extremely susceptible to quince rust.  None of my other apples had CQR damaged fruit last year.  I have read the Red Delicious has the same problem.  And worst of all, the quince rust doesn't just last a year on the cedars like CAR, it will remain viable for 2-3 years.  CAR makes brown hard blobs that hang from cedar twigs and put out shocking orange horns after a rain.  CQR makes orange places along the branches.  I'll take out the 3 mayhaws, but am reluctant to take out the one wild hawthorn.  It's cropped so heavily the last 2 years (even after the terrible 2007 freeze) that maybe there will be some seedlings far enough away we can live with them.  I'll take out what cedars I can, but they can't all come out.  I keep finding that most fruit trees in town are more isolated from cedars than out in the country.  A friend with 2 apple trees in her front yard had just one ugly skinny little cedar just 4 ft tall over in a corner, it was absolutely covered in CAR balls.  Finally I got someone to chop it out.     Donna