The Complete Handbook of Limequats

Chapter 1: Understanding Limequats

Before you plant a tree, buy a case, or add it to a menu, you need to know precisely what a limequat is. The name suggests a simple hybrid of a lime and a kumquat. That is roughly correct, but the details of that hybridisation have a short but significant botanical history, and they determine four things you need to care about immediately: the fruit's cold tolerance, its culinary character, its production quirks, and its legal classification for buying and selling. Get these sorted, and the rest of this handbook will make sense. Get them wrong, and you will be planting an orchard that suffers in a mild frost, or buying fruit that was treated for a pest that your region never has, or expecting juice from a fruit that is best eaten whole.

The limequat is a specific attempt to overcome the single biggest weakness of the true lime. The two common "true" limes used in commerce - the Key lime (Citrus aurantiifolia) and the Persian or Tahiti lime (Citrus latifolia) - are tropical and subtropical trees. They have almost no tolerance for frost. A temperature of -3°C will cause significant damage to the leaves and fruit of a Key lime tree, and a prolonged freeze will often kill it outright. This makes lime production a risky enterprise in any region with even a marginal chance of a hard frost, which has historically pushed commercial production to Florida, Mexico, and other warm, humid climates. The