So far, I've enjoyed almost all the "home-grown" citrus I've tried from my own or Tiny Tom's citrus trees. Even his sour orange.

With Calamansi, I use 3 ripe fruit in my Ninja smoothie machine and the smoothie takes on a very refreshing citrus flavour. Eating them fresh/whole is also refreshing because you get the first real burst of tartness, followed by a burst of citrus and sweetness. I don't think most consumers would enjoy them fresh like that though. Almost everyone nowadays is taught to just choose sweet fruits it seems.

My Calamondin is reaching the very ripe stage. Every time I go past it I stop for a refreshing bite with tang. I think the secret is to let the fruit hang as long as possible to build up the sugar levels.

Ericb - my mom and brother both live relatively near you in Catawba and Caldwell counties. Several years ago I gave both of them small Poncirus trifoliata plants to try outside. With no protection (and little care overall) both have survived and grown each year. Like others have mentioned Poncirus is not something you'd want to eat, but is a very interesting plant to grow where few other citrus could survive.

During the 1980-2010 period Greensboro averaged 6 nights a year at or below 16 degrees F, and 2.6 nights a year at or below 12 degrees F. Hickory was only slightly warmer with 5 and 1.9 nights below the 16 and 12 degree thresholds respectively.

Good luck!

Thank you, everyone, for the advice and pointers and for sharing from your own experiences. Based on y'all's advice, I'm leaning toward planting an Owari satsuma or a Changsha mandarin for a fresh eating fruit. I'm thinking one of the two may be the thing to plant in the one prime spot I have on the south side of my house. Could I keep either of them pruned to about 7 feet tall or is that just going to be too limiting? What do you all think would be the easiest way to protect them that would be adequate for my zone 7a?

Would a Thomasville citrangequat, a citrumelo, or a taichang lemon be more suitable to keeping under 7 feet tall? Those are the other citrus I was considering mainly for sour juice/a lemon substitute. But I'll put one of them elsewhere (which would have to be further from a building) if the fresh eating citrus will fit in front of the house. If anyone is familiar with all three, how do you think they compare?

I also wanted to ask about citranges. Could they be used as a lemon substitute? Are there lemon X trifoliate crosses comparable to the citranges? Would that be something I could just plant out in the open and grow without protection? (I'd certainly like to find out more about swamp lemons, too. Thank you very much for that pointer.) From Stan's website, it appears that the citranges are quite a bit hardier than everything else we've talked about here. I'd have a lot more room to experiment if I didn't have to deal with the time or expense of protection. What are y'all's thoughts on citranges? How useable would they be in your opinions just for sour juice to use in cooking, etc. (if you didn't have anything better)?

In order to protect them outside I prune mine as need to around 5 feet, the thomassville has about 50 fruit currently. My Tiachang lemon hasnt really grown much..........
what has worked for me is planting them in a square, I put a large black (absorbs heat) bucket of water in the middle, in cold times this bucket can be easily heated.....In your area, I bet plastic and blue tarp would work just fine....in my area I need blankets also.........

ok So I would still go with buckets of water in dark containers
but what I do (and I am much colder than u) is frost cloth , plastic to seal the whole encloser. blankets and blue tarp. This is over an arch of PVC pipe. Inside I have buckets of water with a a cheap 50w aquarium heater inside, turned to about 60f, which since there is no movement in the water isnt on all the time. the outside of all this needs to be held down with heavy rock in my area or in my case snow