While daily observing my wife's sister Betsy's weather in Churubusco, IN all winter, we marvelled at how often the temperature there nearly matched ours here in the Mohave Desert! But where theirs varied but little, ours went lows in 40s, highs in 70s, nearly every day in November, December, and January. Our extreme low was 36 one morning. 'Busco had a bout of 5 degrees low, 15 high, for a total of about two weeks! I recall vividly such bone-chilling cold from my 30 years in Chicago. But here, the wind! Three months of it! Out of 90 days, perhaps 8 or 10 of calm; 30 mph sustained winds here are rather common; at 40 degrees, that feels REALLY COLD! The lighter note is our little Valencia Orange tree, purchased from WalMart out of their junk plants, where it was destined to be discarded. $ 15.00 for it! Just a twig, about 15 inches high, looked half dead. We planted it on the patio side of the rock wall, to shield it from the relentless north winds: Last year, it's fifth, it reached as high as the wall! Last year's crop of fruit was prodigious, perhaps 100 oranges. This past year, oranges ripening around here about at Christmastime, the number was far less. We think the winds destroyed a good many blossoms as they formed in March. Today as I sat on the patio this afternoon, I whiffed the wonderful sweet scent of orange blossoms: sure enough the tree is covered with hundreds of them, just forming, late this year by a few weeks. Last year they looked like this: We thought the tree was picked clean, but a few days ago, my wife braved stickers and needles on the Mesquite tree now guarding the orange, and found two giant fruits from 2019! The smaller ones are the last from 2020: Those babies big as grapefruits are stone-hard, likely having little or no juice left in them. The others I will polish off one a day; high phosphorus content denies more. My wife's old boss from Phoenix warned us citrus cannot grow here, it's "too cold". We're happy with it! Frank