Here is a picture of the tree:


During the spring here in North Texas, Home Depot and Walmart were selling a Satsuma Orange. The trees were in 1 gal pots, and stood 2-3 feet high. It was a surprise, since the stores generally stick to lemons.

DW reported a rumor that a 'new' cold tolerant orange was being marketed for zone 7. I had my doubts about a zone 7 orange.

A week after our first 3 or 4 freezes (low of 28, highs in 50s), I checked at Home Depot to see how the unsold trees were doing. There were about 6 satsumas left. They all had lost 80% of their leaves, but new growth was emerging. I bought one and it is doing fine.

Three weeks later. I checked again. We had a serious cold front blow through earlier in the week. It had been at or below freezing for about 36 hours. The low had been around 14 one night and 12 then next. The trees looked like they were dead. All leaves had fallen off or wilted. The trunk still had a lot of green, but that was the only green on the plant. A week later, I brought the above tree home.

After two days in the greenhouse, the branches have started taking on a 'dry' look.

So, could I have deduced the ability of the tree to to recover visually?

zzzzz

ZZZZZ, As long as there is green wood on the plant.. there is a good possibility it will regrow. If the wood ever turns brown. Its goodbye! Id keep the satsuma in a cool place til spring. Water it sparingly and when spring arrives.. put it out in the sun and start your water and some miracle gro. If it still has green branches by spring.. your chances are pretty good.

Stan,

Thanks!!!

>I'd keep the satsuma in a cool place til spring.

I've put it in the greenhouse. The greenhouse isn't particularly cool, though. It gets up to 105 on sunny afternoons.

If the plant will go dormant until April, I can put it in a corner of the house and wait for the last freeze.

zzzzz

I've brought a tree that was in the exact condition as the one you shown back into leaf. As I have a greenhouse I put it in the greenhouse and watered and lightly fertilized (as Stan suggested) and it leafed out again in approximately a month. I would not put it into a 105F temperature extreme. But again as Stan says, if it goes brown, put it down.

The mass merchandizer retail nurseries can handle
some loss of plants due to neglect and weather.
Often times when we look in a nursery we can
pretty well spot which plants were watered and
which ones were not. In the case of this Satsuma
we are seeing the effects of what a quick freeze
can do to a Mandarin when the plant had not had
enough water in the root system to help ward off
the cold. Under similar temperature conditions
here with decent moisture in the root system this
tree would not be showing these effects at 28
degrees, even if this tree was on its own roots, so
we in effect have other factors working against us.
Too much Nitrogen and a quick freeze can cause
the same type symptoms to come about with the
shriveling and leaf desiccation from a quick freeze.
What other areas feel is a quick fix remedy to regain
new growth is a detriment to the plant for the longer
term when grown outdoors. Why? We kill off root
system in trade for top growth and then the new
growth is even more tender to cold than the old
growth was with the next cold snap. On freeze
damaged trees we do what we can for the roots
first which means for container plants we repot
them right now or at least change the soil medium
and give them plenty of humus with no additional
Nitrogen whatsoever. People that recommend any
Nitrogen to be applied now have not grown these
plants outdoors much to see how they behave in
an area that gets a long 4-8 hours or more of a
sustained freeze. Two hours of 28 degree weather
is really nothing providing we have made some
allowances for our plants to withstand such
temperatures. For plants grown outdoors in
containers or planted in the ground we start
our freeze protection with the root system and
with our soil mixes.

I am at a loss why anyone would buy such a plant
as this Satsuma now becomes a project for us. It
is entirely different to me when the plant was
someone's already and then wonder what happened
and why and what should be done now. A greenhouse
grower may say okay let's pop this one in the
greenhouse and baby it a little and it should snap
out of it. To grow this tree outdoors will require
a little more hands on care. Now is not the time
to experiment with potting mixes and potting soils
that may be just fine for an indoor greenhouse
grower but may not be in the plants best interest
now as our thinking for this tree grown outdoors
has changed from the long term to the immediate
short term instead

I'll assume you want to keep this tree outdoors in a
container. You tell us what you want to do with this
tree providing it is now yours. Ask the seller where
this tree came in from as the source for this tree and
where that source is located may come in real handy
to know. It would for me if the tree were mine.

A footnote: Don't put too much emphasis on the failure
of the Avocados I wrote about as we learned a few things
along the way which indeed made what we knew in advance
would eventually fail become a successful venture in its
own right. Sometimes we have to lose a few plants in
an experimental fashion to learn what we did wrong and
also learn what we did right. Let someone else save the
Avocados without any conventional freeze protection
to see a following year at temps much less than what the
experts say those plants can endure and in many cases be
killed outright and then let those people wonder how we
did it. I am not telling in a forum. Telling someone one
on one may be a different story.

Okay, I just reread the posts from zzzzz and see a newfound
conflict. You are not going to get 105 temps in the greenhouse
during the Winter. This plant will be outdoors again long before
that happens unless you want to keep this tree in the greenhouse
year round. Rather than trash all of the above now as it does
not pertain to this quandary any more I'll just run with the above
as is and "close down shop" from this end. Now you want the
greenhouse grower's point of view rather than mine.

Snickles

Snickles, thank you, thank you. Every once in a great while one reads a sentence in a book, or receives an idea, a passing thought, or in this case a post, a post on a forum that directly hits home plate. I made a sign and I hung it in my green house. It reads......." LET SOMEONE ELSE SAVE THE AVOCADOS." You might think I've lost it, but this saying can have a VERY , very broad meaning. - Millet

A quick note: Millet, it is indeed gratifying to see
and read such genuine interest in a plant which so
many people today want but have no understanding
of. We see it more and more of people that want
to have plants but will not put any time into what
it takes or may take to learn from those plants. I
find the enthusiasm in this forum so refreshing as
the same kind of enthusiasm has been around in
select numbers in the past but in the present it is
almost totally lacking in specialty plants.

Sometimes we need an old war horses point of
view of these plants that were not afraid to risk
failure to learn something we did not previously
know or knew how to deal with. In today's world
research funding is based on success or based
on telling the entity that is funding the research
project what they want to hear. We start out with
an objective and what we know will happen in the
end and then fudge the reports just to justify more
funding. I call it selling our souls for dollars. In
the days of old we did not have to rely on funding
dollars to carry out research experiments in which
we learned much more from failure than we did
from success.

Snickles

snickles,

Thank you for the post. There is a great deal of information and I appreciate your thoughtful comments.

I've added a lows for the 'hard freeze' to the original post. Here is some additional data:

Code:

Date      High  Low      Dec   6    61   27  Dec   7    37   21  Dec   8    32   14  Dec   9    45   12  Dec  10    61   23

Between 8 PM on Dec 7 and 10 AM on Dec 9, the temp never rose above freezing.

As to my purchase of the tree, let me say that it was purchased to learn more about the citrus dealing with our North Texas weather. I've been watching the group of trees from which this came since the spring. I was afraid it would be put in a dumpster. I needed to know if it could recover.

As to the habitat of my citrus, they get a greehouse put over them from Nov 15 to April 15. The rest of the year, they are outdoors.

zzzzz

ZZZZZ, you don't have to justify why you wanted
this tree to me as I've done the same kind of thing
many times also with other plants. Sometimes we
feel sorry for the plant and hope with better care
we can get the plant to become rejuvenated. I used
to take on plant projects just to see if I could nurse
them back to health. My only concern is that when
we do this sort of thing we take the iffy or neglected
plant off the hands of the people that did not care
about it at all. It is just one plant among many is
how the mass merchandizer retail nurseries look
at things. I've seen some plants in the past that
I wish I had now that I passed on that later died in
the nursery, all too often due to neglect. It is a horror
story that can haunt us for years trying to track down
those plants and then come up empty and then wonder
if we did the right thing back when not to take them
when we could have had them, as now we may wish
we had tried to salvage a plant that may be rather
elusive to find anywhere now.

You did just fine as this Satsuma will snap out of it.
Just give it time. There is plenty of green growth left
to work with.

Good luck with it!

Snickles

Here is how it looks now. It has been in the greenhouse for 2 weeks. I haven't done anything to it, except insure there is a little moisture in the soil.

No growth. Brown areas of the bark seem to be increasing.

ZZZZZ, I had the same thing happen to me last spring . Almost all my citrus were going down - looking like yours. Meyers lem. was the worst. I cut all dead branches off & when more died, I cut them off. It was just a bare stump just few inches up from graft. I flushed the soil (as Millet suggested then) & I now have several new branches with new blossoms -most are falling off w/ no fruits, but it's very much ALIVE.
Just cut back all dead parts off & keep it moist--not wet & not TOO warm & I'll pray it comes back like mine did. Good luck
Patty

Here is a update:


The bark continues to brown. There is no obvious sign of new growth.

The tree has been protected from freezes by keeping in my greenhouse. I'm not doing as good as I would like keeping the temperature below 95, though. We have had a warm winter in North Texas, and temperatures can get up to 105 on sunny days.

Today, I cut off 5 or 6 brown twigs. They were getting in the way when I moved the tree around. I thought they were entirely brown and thus dead. Visual inspection of the cut surfaces showed a fair amount of green tissue within every twig, though. I was surprised, and wished I had checked for live after the first cut.

This evening, I took some close-ups of one of the cuts (1/8" diameter). The image on the left was taken about 7 hours after making the cut, and 20 minutes after bringing it in doors. The second image was taken 40 minutes later (to test a second camera).

I was surprised to discover the 'foam' had disappeared when the second shot was taken. Perhaps it was an effect caused by moving the plant inside (70 deg). It was about 55 deg outside.

Anyway, it seems the plant is clearly alive. It's ability to recover is of course another matter. I think that I'll start leaving it out on the porch where it will get a little direct sunlight and avoid the greenhouse heat.



Mark

zzzz, if the tree still is green after this much time, then the root system is still alive. Keep an eye on the branches, if the tree starts to produce new leaves it will be just above where the old leaves were attached.to the branch. You should be able to see small round lighter colored dots on the branches where the old leaves were attached before they fell. I notice that evidently a lot of the soil has been washed out of the pot, probably by irrigation at the nursery and at the seller. I think the trees chances are 50/50. Thanks for the up date, interesting. - Millet

Here a last picture of the tree:


The tree continues to lose green bark. I broke off what looked like a 'dead' twig, but there was a slight hint of green within the twigs core.

My gosh, get those dead leaves out & add some soil. The soil level looks way low...I can see roots. Did you check the roots? Maybe repot & add more medium. Cut all brown branches off. Let us know how it's doing.