I bought a container orange from i believe Spring Hill Nursery. It came about easter time, it was bare root, and came with a pot and soil. From reading this forum i realize this soil is likely sub-par since it looks alot like normal potting soil, when it grows bigger or spring comes i may try to repot it. Anyway, today i was looking over my plant. It recently set forth like 6 new leaves and that's fine, but i noticed it has started to grow thorns. Does this mean it is reverting to juvenile state and will take forever to give me fruit or is this just normal regeneration of thorns that it may have had that were removed before shipping for easier transport?
-Smiley

Hello HersirSmiley!

Perhaps your plant was not bare rooted because it came with a pot and soil. Citruses that are bare rooted will barely survive unless you're well experienced in handling bare-rooted citruses.

One possibility is that you could also have the rootstock instead and the employee who got it for you didn't know any better.

Just wait it out for now, you can always ask for budwoods from members in same regions where you can legally get them, and do the grafting. It's quite easy to do, overwhelming at first, but then easier as you get the hang of it.

And when it comes to grafting, this forum is one of the very good ones around.

Joe

Most citrus have thorns to some degree even when mature. My navel oranges have wicked thorns, but they are mature and still produce fruit.

When i said it came with a pot and soil and the plant was bare rooted, i meant the plant had few roots which all were exposed, an empty container, and a bag full of soil arrived in a box. they were not combined until i opened the box and did so myself. It is good to know that this is normal and i don't have to worry about it going juvenile on me. Thank you.

It's quite an achievement for your plant to survive the bare-rooting in transit ordeal. There are several cheap ways to prevent soil agitation or falling off from the pot during transit. Spring Hill Nursery should order plants from Wellspring in eBay and then learn first hand how they are doing it.

As Laaz have said, it depends on cultivars if the thorns will show up again, and this is normal, unless the cultivar is specifically thornless. So you could have the real deal.

good, thank you for your help.