I've spent several exciting hours here - such an amount of very interesting info!! Greatest thanks to you all for posting!
Fruiting citrus trees have been my dream since my childhood already - but it took more than years before my dream finally came true in 1992. I bought a mandarin tree, grew it three years and got two fruits - after which the tree died quickly. I was so-o-o-o unhappy!
After some years, I managed to get a lemon tree - and it died even before I could saw any fruits... You may easily guess that I was not happier than after loosing the mandarin tree. Well, some more years passed and I managed to get cuttings of three Lemon varieties - Pavlovsky, Ponderosa and Yubileinaya. I grew up several trees. The first one that died, was Yubileinaya. Then the Ponderosa gave a very big and extremely seedy fruit - and quickly passed away after that. The remaining three Pavlovskys grew happily and fruited pretty well during following three years - after which started to decline and left me with nothing again...
Well, this pattern simply could not go on and when I finally could build a greenhouse in 2007, I started again. One of the first plants that found it's home in my new greenhouse was a 1.5 m lemon seedling: I made a higher bed and planted it directly into the soil - together with a somewhat smaller mandarin seedling. As both of the plants overwintered well, I obtained some more citruses (potted plants) last spring - the Ruby Red Grapefruit, the Washington Navel Orange, a mandarin, a calamondin and a kumqwat. I also had saved one tiny Pavlovsky lemon tree and I decided to plant it directly into soil as well. At present it seems that all of the trees feel themselves pretty good - a new growth is about to start and I also see first flower buds. The foliage is nice green and no signs of WLD so far, so I guess it's all OK with them.
Of course, the greenhouse is not very big and I do not have place for additional trees - OK, well, maybe only for one if to think about. But not surprisingly, I would like to grow more varieties: the lemon seedling (now about three meters high and with several nice branches for grafting) is waiting for new varieties. Hours spent browsing this forum already made me thinking about Page, Ponkan and Gold Nugget mandarins as well as Oroblanco grapefruit and Tarocco orange.
Best wishes!
Harri
Estonia.
