With Dell's new mouse it is simple to know if a picture is photo shopped or not. Just put the mouse over the picture and it tells you if it is or not.- Millet

The weather has been very citrus unfriendly here in the past weeks. Plants are growing slowly, and the young fruits are hardly growing at all! It's really discouraging... I hope to see some changes soon...

In the mean time I have started looking into something else. Growing a decent blood orange is probably never going to work. But the anthocyanin coloring is still fascinating me, and also occurs in other fruit, like apples!

Today I bought a rare red fleshed apple tree variety called "Dries", which probably occurred as a chance seedling...



My tree doesn't carry any fruit at the moment, but I hope it will next year.

Here's a (bad) google translation of the web site describing this apple variety:

http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=nl&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fdemoerbeiboom.be%2Fnl%2Fcatalogus%2Froodvlezige-appel&act=url

Today I cut off one of the two grapefruits of my little star ruby tree. The fruits are small for a grapefruit, somewhere between a small orange and a large mandarin in size...

The fruit:


Peeled. The fruit was hard to peel. The inside color was promising though...


Taken apart:


The flesh. I wanted to take the flesh out in the same way as I usually do with a grapefruit by carefully cutting open the parts with a knife and then taking the flesh out in whole, but that turned out to be nearly impossible with this fruit. It probably wasn't ripe enough...


The fruit didn't smell grapefruit-like, but the taste was very good. It wasn't exactly sweet, but not too acid either. The typical bitterness of a grapefruit was clearly present. I liked it!

Really nice one. I rather prefer cutting grapefruits in slices, peeling can often squeeze the whole fruit...

Things finally seem to get going a little. Most plants are growing new shoots and the little fruitlets are starting to increase in size.

Valencia orange. Not exactly large yet but the largest of the fruits on that tree...


Remaining chinotto orange from last year, growing fast now. I hope this one will be a bit juicy because the other chinottos from that tree were extremely dry inside.


Star ruby grapefruit. The one remaining from last year still appears to be getting larger. The fruitlet from the single flower from this year isn't growing (yet)...



Bergamot fruitlets, now starting to grow.

Bergamot fruit from last year, still growing...


Bearss limes from last year. No new fruit this year...


Red clementine doing fine after severe pruning, and the one fruit from the fall flowering of last year growing steadily...



Twin moro orange!...


Salustiana oranges:



Feminello lemons:


Seedlings from a recently bought pomelo fruit:


Poncirus Trifoliata seedlings. Some appear to have albino growth at the top leaves...

Finally, it seems, the things are getting started to you too...
Lets just hope we're all facing a long summer, which might be crucial for our citrus, to get back in shape for possibly another tough winter ahead.

Today is my first official grafting attempt!

A while ago I ordered an Australian Finger lime from my preferred nursery, grafted on poncirus. Because I already ordered many plants there in the past, they added a little extra, a small finger lime of a different variety as a rooted cutting. While the grafted plant grows nicely, the rooted cutting just sits there doing nothing. So I decided to attempt to graft a piece of the rooted plant on one of my young poncirus seedlings!

This is a picture of it. I used the clothespin method...

It will be interesting to see if that works.

Of course it works. And I found, that not only on citrus plants
- my small pouteria sapota (mamey colorado) cv. Pantin had demaged trunk by some animals or insects or what, so I quickly decide to save this variety for me. For the first time in my life, I grafted sapota plants 2 weeks ago - I grafted 3 sapota seedlings with budwood from my dying plant - using clothespins and cleft grafting and 2 of 3 attempts are succesful.
I can only advice to Marc, to put some drops of water inside those plastick bag, or use plastic bottle, which can allow moisture from soil keep air around plant wet.

Several of my plants are starting new flowers currently, like the moro and salustiana oranges, the tahiti lime and the buddha's hand. There are also flowers present on the feminello lemon, but then this plant just keeps pushing flowers out all the time. And I notice new growth that looks like tiny flower buds on the eustis limequat also.

Many of these flowers will set fruit, but out of experience I know that, as soon as I take the plants inside for the winter months, those young fruits will start to drop off...

Seeing all this new growth sparks my enthusiasm again, making me want to buy new plants!

Some plants that I have in mind are:
- Tarocco rosso
- Sfusato Sorrento lemon
- Nine pound lemon
- Ponderosa lemon
- Striata sour orange
- Bouquet de fleurs sour orange
- Amoa 8 clementine
- Corsican citron
- Sicilian citron
- ...

You're absolutely right about that!