Some us of have not done a good job of giving people some insight as to how some of these plants will do as individual plants. Yes, we can grow Citrus in a wide variety of environments such as in ground, outdoors in containers, indoors in containers, indoors in containers in a greenhouse, in ground in a greenhouse, in a container in an atrium, in ground in an atrium, in containers underground and in ground underground as well as grown indoors hydroponically and grown outdoors hydroponically. We have a lot of choices as to how we want to grow Citrus and we also have a wide array of methods to grow Citrus depending on the culture and the environment we choose to grow our Citrus in.

What we have not done well at all is tell people which Citrus are more likely to do well when grown indoors in a home in a container that cannot be moved outside due to climate as opposed to the portable Citrus that can be moved outside when the temperatures allow the plant to be moved. We do not know for sure what moving a plant in a container in a greenhouse out into the home will do for a specific Citrus plant. We might have success with a specific Lemon and we also may have some real problems with another variety of Lemon.

Years ago I put together a dwarf Mandarin collection that they all started out as five gallons that I had for 2-5 years before I planted them in the ground. I was excited at the opportunity to have such a collection that I felt I would have for a number of years. Well, the freeze in 1990 did some major damage to my plants and the follow up years freeze in 1991 did them in. I had a good friends Citrus collection on our blacktop driveway all in containers and all of his Citrus were semi-dwarfs, about 45 plants then and they endured the cold and snapped out of it and 28 of the 32 dwarf Mandarins I had in the ground, including a Nadorcott all died out on me after the freeze of 1991. How many years do you think it was before I had another dwarf Citrus of any kind? I can tell you, it was 15 years before I would let another dwarf form Citrus come in. I also know of several Lemon groves nearby that had it worse than I did. Our production Navels and the Orlando Tangelos along with the newly planted Blood Oranges got hurt but the crop was off the trees and in the packinghouse for the Navels but we lost the crop of the Tangelos. I did not complain about that as for our area it was standard thinking that our goal was to have three good years out of ten in production and if we got that we were successful. The large number of Lemon groves got hit so hard that they lost trees at a time when there was no insurance for the lost trees or crop insurance on perishable crops out here other than a raisin crop but not the vines were covered and so people lost a ton of trees in the those two freezes and had no money come back to them at all. Some of the Lemons that I know of near Clovis took almost 10 years just to produce a crop again. How many of you can endure that kind of financial hit? The bottom line here is that through research of plants of which most of them first came into Florida and were moved West and from production growers in Florida and California set the stage for Citrus to be grown elsewhere and today everyone takes it for granted that all of the efforts of the people in the past have led to people today feeling like they know something about these plants. Yet when we get down to it, we know so very little still and others just give their shoulder a shrug and feel like it is no big deal. It is a big deal as even today we cannot say with certainty that a newly planted grove in South Carolina will make it and become successful. We cannot say with certainty that a newly planted grove in Watsonville near where I am can make it and be rather successful. We cannot even say with certainty that newly planted Esrogs in Lemon Cove can make it for the next 20 years and become a successful enterprise and yet people in this forum are reliant on getting fruit from some of these growers though marketing co ops and the stores and expect to buy a fruit, grow the seed on and get a fruit as good as the parent tree was. No one talks about what impact the rootstocks have on the fruit yet we know that genes from the rootstock get into the seed produced by the varietal fruit and people still don't buy that altruism.

Now, when we buy a budded or grafted tree we expect the fruit to be super dooper the first year it has fruit for us and wonder what went wrong when the fruit does not seem as good to us as we expected it to be. Maybe it is not supposed to be all that "hot" for a while. Our old Meyer Lemon on its own roots was not "all that" when we grew it in the ground in San Pedro but when we moved to here in the Central Valley about two years later it had Lemons that were all that. Even after it endured precocious temps down to 6 degrees in its first year here from a previous setting whereby the temps usually got no lower than the high 40's, low 50's. A marked difference in cool temperature but an important one in the aiding in the role enabling the tree to produce more sugar content in the fruit for the years to come.

There are a lot of variables that can lead to a fruit not being ripe. First thing we do is take into account when the fruit is supposed to be ripe, the range of time in which the fruit is supposed to ripen. Next comes the age of the tree. Citrus can take up to seven years in the ground to achieve their peak potential to yield a quality fresh taste for a Washington
Navel. It used to be a little longer for container grown plants and longer still for indoor (have to clarify this as meaning grown inside the home, not necessarily grown in a container in a greenhouse or certainly may not apply for a tree grown in ground in a greenhouse) grown container plants. For a container plant we have to take into consideration the soil content as artificial soils do not have the mineral content that a bona fide soil will have. People talk in terms of applying liquid forms of fertilizer once a month which is okay for a container plant but is not okay for an in ground plant in a silt, silt loam, clay or a clay loam soil. Growing plants in a container are not supposed to yield fruit with the quality that these plants can achieve in the ground. That is just a given that has held true for a long while, no matter what we supplement the plant with such as soil amendments and fertilizers. Next comes the acid/base content of our potting soil in the container. Citrus can grow fine in an acid medium but the fruit will not have the flavor that a tree can get when grown in a saline soil in ground. Why, there are more minerals in the saline soil. Even alkaline soils can yield quality fruit as long as we have good drainage when we apply water. Navels as a group like a soil in the pH range or 7- 9.5 to develop their better flavor. Light intensity comes into play with container plants as the more light the plant gets the more the tree has the ability to synthesize, break down and store salts, sugars, oils and proteins that can lead to the fruit being less bitter in taste. Water quality and the amount of minerals in the water is important. Tap water in several cities have chlorine in the water to neutralize harmful bacteria once ingested. The chlorine can impact how a Navel Orange can taste making the fruit less sweet in some cases but for outdoor container plants can help give the fruit in some cases a flavor enhancement much like sprinkling salt on a prepared food. For indoor in the home container plants the results may not be the same as then too much chlorine can suppress and inhibit the amount of sugar going into the fruit.

The important questions that I would have are whose clone of Washington Navel or other Navel do you have, who put together the plant and grew the plant that was sold to you. Then I'd want to know which rootstock was used and was it a standard, a semi-dwarf or a dwarf form rootstock. The last I'd want to know if the tree was budded, was it grafted or is it on its own roots?

Another side of the equation.

Several years ago I tasted a Blood Orange grown in Imperial County that just knocked my socks off. I was told it came about as a selected Tarocco arising from a branch sport that had color inside the fruit that we do not always see here. The acid balance was superb, giving the fruit a sprite taste yet sweet and full of flavor, again unlike many of the Tarocco we have here. I concluded then that they had the right location, climate, minerals in the water, soil type, the whole bit that made me envious of them that for 20 years of trying I could not grow a Tarocco as good as that Orange. So I got a cutting from that tree, had it budded in the nursery and we grew some of them on and lo and behold our fruit turned out just like all of the others we had previously. Sometimes we just have to face it that some areas can grow a specific plant better than others can and give them their due credit.

No, the Trovita does not have the heat requirement to ripen but it does to some extent have to have some warmth to fully mature. This is what caused the problems with some of the Trovita in the inland coastal areas that the fruit could be picked off the tree when ripe but the fruit had a little more acidity than some people liked. The flavor of the fruit that I tasted in Watsonville years ago was okay by me but did not have the juiciness when mature but did have some sweetness to it but I was told that was about as sweet as it got there back in the late 80's. I took some of mine with me from here to compare but there was not much of a comparison at that time but still that would not stop me from trying to grow a Trovita in the inland coast or along the coast as even then the Orange was good enough for fresh eating. It just was not as good as the fruit my tree produces.

We can find that Joe can grow a better Calamondin where he is than I can here or that Gene Lester may be able to grow a better Owari Satsusma earlier in the year than we can. The inland coast is known for growing a better Dancy than we can in the early season as we have to hold ours on the trees longer than they have to but when mature ours have more sweetness later but to have these in the stores by Thanksgiving we cannot compete with them and we do not try to either. We still cannot get a Murcott (Florida Honey) sweet early enough to compete with the fruit that comes in from Florida. We can later but they get the premium pricing as they should. I remember as a young lad eating a sliced sweet Citron in Palos Verdes just up the hill from San Pedro where we lived. Never tasted one even close to that since. Now, I will not even attempt to eat a Citron right off the tree like we did that one. Every area nowadays has the ability to grow good Citrus and we can see just in this forum Citrus is being grown in areas now that in the recent past was thought to be unheard of, even in the hills of Santa Cruz! I think we have come a long way and as more people are willing to grow these plants in their homes indoors and outdoors we will have even more of an explosion of interest in these plants.

As someone that deals with shipped fruit, I can say that not all of the better fruit stay in the US. There are times that people in parts of Canada may have some of our better fruit in their grocery stores than we will have here. Ripe fruit and mature fruit are two different things as when someone comes out to Reedley in late July or the early part of August and eats their first tree ripe Nectarine will attest with their comment that they did not know that a Nectarine could taste so good. The unfortunate part is back in New York they get the rock hard fruit shipped to them that we can bounce on the floor and not hurt it with no juiciness and limited sugar and then eat a tree ripe fruit that just explodes with juice and flavor right in ones mouth. We cannot compare the two and we should not compare one area over another either. Where we are there is tradition in the quality of the Washington Navel Oranges that other areas cannot match but other areas have their own Citrus that we cannot match is how it works. No one part of this state or this part of the region is that much better than let's say Florida is. We, along with Texas and Arizona are all about the same aside from numbers of fruit as none of us can compare to Florida and each region has their strength for certain Citrus such as Texas with their Grapefruit. I think we learned with Wine Grapes that the only limiting factor in growing quality Grapes was us, that we can grow good vines in a variety of climates and microclimates. Napa does not have the foothold it once had as now even Grapes in Mendocino, Monterey and Paso Robles and the Central coast, as well as New York and the state of Washington can compete in quality of the Wines they are producing.

Joe, you should be over at Gene's a lot. Citrus to me without some practical application for it has no meaning to me. The names of varieties are just names until we know what to do with them. That is the production grower view I have and as a collector I am only going to have Citrus that I've tasted prior to wanting to grow them and then wait until I can find a tree of it, now that I cannot buy the trees wholesale any more. I don't live and breathe Citrus. I deal with Citrus in some way every day but Citrus is not my number one plant that is the most dear to me. Citrus is in my top three plants however.

Jim

Very interesting post mate.One comment i could make and no offence.
You mentioned about tap water having chlorine in it being bad for trees.That
is easily dealt with.Leave your watering can to stand for 15-20 minutes.The
chlorine evaporates from the water.Its something a lot of restaurants do
with jugs of water.I used to work in a swimming pool,the top 6 inches above
the water are chocker with chlorine gas! really good for your lungs,when
you swimming hard out.You can smell the chlorine in the tap water here in nz.Hope this bit of info can help everyone.cheers

Laidbackdood,

Unfortunately here in the US many, if not most, urban municipal water suppliers have switched from chlorine to chloramine. Chloramine is much more stable than chlorine. Besides, even chlorine treated tap water would need a bit more than 15-20 minutes to remove the chlorine, unless you boil the water. But then you have to wait for the de-chlorinated water to cool, unless you have a counter-flow or plate chiller. But chloramine really needs to be chemically reduced so that the residual chlorine can readily dissipate.

Kent

Jim,

I'm sorry you feel your posts are not always welcome on this forum. I certainly find them informative and thought provoking.

Kent

Ok that sounds different.All i know is that here in new zealand you can smell
the chlorine in the water.You leave it to stand and the smell goes,its light
and it evaporates.What makes that chloromine different? The approach i
mention has been used by restaurants for years.Actually our water comes
from the polluted waikato river.Gods knows what they do to it at treatment,thats why i got a water filter.
Good luck with those yummy navel oranges you grow over there.Buy them
from my shop here everytime.Grown in california i believe.Must be all that
lovely weather you have.cheers

Jim, thank you for your excellent post. Many hobby growers purchase a containerized citrus tree, and simply grow it by providing water and fertilizer, and seldom evaluate the tree as to how it responds to it surroundings, or how it responds to the restriction placed on it. I believe your correct stating the "big three" as far as citrus culture, or any plant for that manner, is rootstock, location, grower and how they relate to the variety being grown. I have always believed that 98 percent of all containerized trees sold by nurseries are not worth buying, as many are already root bound with a root system endlessly circling the container's walls. Eighty percent of the roots are already "growing" in mass within 1 inch of the container wall. A good nursery should 1.) Sell the tree in the first year before the tree becomes root bound, 2.) Transplant it into a larger container before the roots become restricted, being careful to obeying the 4-INCH RULE, or 3). throw the tree away. I don't know if I agree with the 7-9.5pH, but that would make a good discussion topic of it own. Jim, very nice post.- Millet

Welcome Back Millet!

Ditto for Jim's excellent and informative posts!

Trovita is a non-navel sport of Washington Navel.
I ordered one from Four Winds Growers in California about 25 years ago. Back then, there were no problems exporting from US to UK. It has always fruited reliably, and has the best tasting oranges of the varieties in my greenhouse. Having said that, it still can't compare to the best oranges from a proper citrus-growing climate.
Mike.
PS. Just dug out the Phytosanitary Certificate to check the date. Dispatched California March 17th 1982. So it is the 25th Anniversary!