February 7-10, 2017
Meet Your Orange
Farmer
Farmer Kelli dropped by for a visit this week in Nutrition Expedition to talk about her recent harvest of oranges 😉. We learned all about how oranges are grown, looked at real orange seeds, and watched a few cute videos about oranges.
Did you know that bees play a very important role in orange production? Much like the apple tree, bees are a big help when it comes to pollinating/fertilizing orange blossoms, which are the flowers that grow on orange trees. While many orange trees are self-pollinators, meaning they have both the necessary parts for fertilization in their flowers, more and more varieties of oranges are being produced that are self-incompatible and require assistance from bees. Read more about this concept here. The infants and toddlers had a lot of fun with a pom-pom bee, flying around and "pollinating".
Orange trees can be grown from seed, but large-scale orange production usually begins with grafting (inserting a small branch from one tree into a cut on another tree)because it is much faster. By using the process of grafting, time to maturity, or fruit bearing, can be cut down to 3 years! Trees from seed can take up to 15 years before they begin producing fruit. Read more about this here and here.
Here are the videos we watched:
Super Sleuth Questions
1. What do bees do for orange blossoms? (answer: they pollinate)
2. What do oranges grow on? (answer: a tree)
3. Do oranges grow in cold or warm climates? (answer: warm)
4. What do oranges need in order to grow? (answer: water and plenty of sunlight)
