I have a mix of new trees from Home Depot and Fourwinds. The bareroot fourwinds trees were potted in peat/cedar mulch mix with some perlite added. The home depot trees I had hastily placed in 2" larger containers with the same soil mix to fill the out, though one is now in a rootmaker that Millet was kind enough to provide to me. They are all lined up on a southern exposure with the pots mostly shielded behind a wall.
One of the fourwinds trees, a Eustis Limequat, arrived with somewhat mottled yellow between the veins (which remain green) over the whole tree. I contacted Fourwinds with pictures and they responded that it is likely slow fertilizer uptake. I have applied a 1tsp/gal miracid plus 1tsp/gal of 10% chelated iron twice to roots in the past few weeks. I did not see any change, and yesterday sprayed the leaves with 1/4tsp/gal of a 20-14-18 orchid fert which contains micronutrients (N = 10% ammonia, 10% nitrate, no urea). Today it looks somewhat worse, with tiny yellow spots on the leaves. Any idea what may be wrong? I am worried I may be messing with it too much. It looks healthy aside from the coloration.
This is how the limequat looked a couple days after I received it
And this is how it looks today
The Home Depot trees had all blown over at the store and had broken branches when I bought them but they were hard to pass up. I noticed that the three which I had hastily repotted looked somewhat wilted despite ample water. I pulled them out of the pots and noticed that they were a lot more pot bound than I realized at first. I dipped them in a bucket of water and started gently teasing the roots loose and getting all the old medium out and uncircling the roots. I removed about 90% of the dirt and found the center of the root mass was mostly dry and the pile of old soil was full of dead roots. There were still a large amount of roots remaining on the tree, with some white tips. I potted the now bare-root trees in peat/cedar/perlite mix and watered them thoroughly. They have very good drainage. However today I found that one still feels like the leaves are drying out and some have wilted new and old foliage. I expected some root damage as a result of the aggressive soil removal but I figured that it was better than leaving the compacted ball that were originally there. Are these likely to recover or do you think I went to far?
This is how the roots looked on all the HD trees when I got them a few weeks ago
The owari still has curled leaves that feel very dry, same as before
The new growth on this meyer lemon is very wilted starting today
The weather the past couple nights has been ~45F and it was very windy today. I am wondering if the combination of the this and the repotting has just stressed them. I worry about direct sun burning the pots but it may be that they are simply too cold?
