Happy New Year citrus post!
I figured I'd celebrate the new year with PICTURES!
The draft screen has been working really well this year. One of the boards kind of warped a little last year; I put that one next to the wall with the warp facing outward, and it's actually working extremely well to keep drafts off the trees when I have my fan running. The curve of the wood directs the air along the screen and away from the plants.
My dad and I made this last year out of two pieces of really cheap plywood. I'm talking, like, $6 a sheet plywood. We cut four slats, 6 x 2 feet, which left me with two pieces that were 4 x 2 feet that I just threw away because I didn't have a use for anything that small. Then we drilled four holes down each edge of each slat.
I put the screen together with plastic wireties, and set it up around my bedroom window as a shield around the plants. It looks like this:
You can see my rosary vine hanging on the screen heh. It REALLY needs to be repotted and trimmed - I plan to do that in the spring. You can also kind of see where one of the fluorescent plant lights is clipped to the screen in the upper lefthand corner. I have two of these shining on the plants after sundown until about 9-ish.
The screen doesn't look too atrocious for having cost me like $15. I cut the wireties in the spring when I put the plants outside to break it down for storage.
Shielding citrus trees from drafts when they are indoors is ABSOLUTELY VITAL. No citrus tree likes a draft - some are more tolerant than others, but none of them are pleased by drafts. Cold drafts are the most noticable to you, but the hot, dry air that comes out of a heating vent is just as bad for a tree.
Here's what it looks like inside the screen. I've turned the lights on here, otherwise you wouldn't be able to see as much. The one you're seeing the most of here is the Washington navel orange, with the tangelo in the back. The lemons are in the lower left.
This is a better image of just the lemons. The Eureka lemon is in the back, and the Meyer lemon in front.
The Washington navel hasn't changed very much since I brought it indoors. Except for these:
The tree unexpectedly started to flower around the beginning of December. The fruit BALLOONED out ... by the time I noticed that I had fruit, the largest were the size of marbles. Those fell off, though. The second picture up there are of new oranges about the same size as the first when they were shed.
This tree has been crazy bad about fruit drop.
Most of the fruit ends up looking like this. I have high hopes for at least some oranges from it next year, though. I'm hoping that its eagerness to drop fruit has to do with my watering schedule. I tend to keep my trees a little on the dry side in the winter; I've started to give the Washington navel a little bit of water mid-week to keep it slightly moister. Maybe that will make it want to set fruit.
It could also give the tree foot rot. >:E We'll see.
The Minneola tangelo, which gave me a dozen or so delicious juicy fruit last year, has done exactly nothing this year.
Part of that was due to the unseasonably hot spring we had in early 2007. Right after the trees bloomed and started to set fruit, it shot up to, like, 100 degrees for about two weeks. o.O The hot weather made all the trees drop EVERYTHING. I'd probably have tangelos ripening right now if not for that, cos the tangelo is dead eager to throw out fruit for me.
In early December, the Minneola tangelo started to drop leaves. OH NO I said! It had only dropped, like, 10 when I brought in indoors for the winter, which I thought was awesome ... it is a very sensitive tree, and even a mild shock makes it throw off just about all its foliage. I figured the worst was over, but when I went in there to water it one weekend, the pot was covered in shed leaves.
Well, it turns out that it was nothing to worry about.
The tree was just getting rid of a couple of twigs. Twig dieback is normal in citrus trees - every now and then the tree just decides it doesn't want a particular twig after all, so it drops all the leaves off that twig and the twig dies back to the branch. As long as it doesn't drop more than a couple of twigs, there's nothing to be alarmed about with this. In the spring, I'll cut these dead twigs back to the branches when I do my regular spring pruning.
But you can see why I got alarmed by the sheer number of leaves that fell all at once.
As if to make up for that, the tangelo is putting out some new growth. Kind of unusual for it to grow like this in the winter.
The Washington navel is putting out a little new growth, too.
So is the Meyer lemon. It's like they got into a conference and decided that they all needed to grow a little before spring. It's actually kind of annoying, because the leaves they produce in the winter are huge, floppy things due to the dimness of the light. Even though I have two bright full-spectrum fluorescent lights on the trees, that is NOTHING in comparison with full sunlight. And the sunlight that comes in through the window during the day really doesn't cut it either.
The Eureka lemon, however, is definitely winning the contest. Look how gangly this sucker is! The tree doesn't realize it, but it's going to get a real hard look in the spring when I'm holding the pruning shears. I'm not sure I want all this leggy growth.
The leaf in the middle-right, that looks almost wet, that's the kind of leaf that citrus put out in the winter. You can see how huge it is compared with the normal foliage. The whole branch climbing up the screen on the left is nothing but stuff it started to put out when I brought it indoors.
Here's a better look at the gangly branch. Everything above the arrow is new since November, and you can see the skinny little twig at the top where it is putting out MORE growth.
I can forgive the tree for being retarded, though.
It also likes to give me fruit. :D
The Meyer lemon is probably the least interesting of the bunch, because it almost died last winter and is still recovering. It's also not very photogenic, and I had a hard time getting a shot of it that didn't make it look like a zombie tree. As I predicted, it dropped all of the fruit from that mad flowering spree it had in the fall. It's just as well, since I would have pruned off the fruit anyway.
That's all for the citrus trees, but that's not all that I have in the citrus corner!
You may notice that my Sago palm has a second set of leaves on it. It only had the one set the last time I took a picture of it. I asked if the plant was plastic back then, and I think it got offended because it threw out another set of leaves within two weeks after I made that statement in its hearing. The Sago palm is harumphing at you in this picture.
I have it in with the citrus because it, too, likes very bright light, and the brightest light in the house is under those plant lights.
Grandpa here doesn't like bright light so much, but he's okay with the plant lights. That should tell you just how deadly bright they are (not very). There's just no substitute for real sunlight. Grandpa is holding onto the strings for my miniblinds here. The miniblinds are broken - that's not helping the lighting situation any, but things will be okay until spring. Then I really need new miniblinds.
My fig tree. This tree is about 12 inches tall right now if you don't count the pot. This is the one that was sold to my parents as a "bonsai" but you can clearly see that it does not resemble a miniature adult tree so much as it resembles a sad hacked-off stub struggling for life.
Ironically, if I could get rid of that little stumpy bit in the middle, it would look vaguely bonsai-ish (if the person creating the bonsai were totally incompetent that is). I don't know how to cut that off, though. I may consult my dad in the spring. He has stuff like dremel tools that would minimize the trauma on the tree.
Notice how I keep putting shit off until spring? Pruning the citrus trees really can't be done until April-May-ish, but stuff like trimming this fig tree could be easily done right now cos I never put it outside anyway. This is because I am a procrastinator, and I like to do stuff all at the same time and get it out of the way at once.
That's it for this post. Happy new year, everyone!
The draft screen has been working really well this year. One of the boards kind of warped a little last year; I put that one next to the wall with the warp facing outward, and it's actually working extremely well to keep drafts off the trees when I have my fan running. The curve of the wood directs the air along the screen and away from the plants.
My dad and I made this last year out of two pieces of really cheap plywood. I'm talking, like, $6 a sheet plywood. We cut four slats, 6 x 2 feet, which left me with two pieces that were 4 x 2 feet that I just threw away because I didn't have a use for anything that small. Then we drilled four holes down each edge of each slat.
I put the screen together with plastic wireties, and set it up around my bedroom window as a shield around the plants. It looks like this:
You can see my rosary vine hanging on the screen heh. It REALLY needs to be repotted and trimmed - I plan to do that in the spring. You can also kind of see where one of the fluorescent plant lights is clipped to the screen in the upper lefthand corner. I have two of these shining on the plants after sundown until about 9-ish.
The screen doesn't look too atrocious for having cost me like $15. I cut the wireties in the spring when I put the plants outside to break it down for storage.
Shielding citrus trees from drafts when they are indoors is ABSOLUTELY VITAL. No citrus tree likes a draft - some are more tolerant than others, but none of them are pleased by drafts. Cold drafts are the most noticable to you, but the hot, dry air that comes out of a heating vent is just as bad for a tree.
Here's what it looks like inside the screen. I've turned the lights on here, otherwise you wouldn't be able to see as much. The one you're seeing the most of here is the Washington navel orange, with the tangelo in the back. The lemons are in the lower left.
This is a better image of just the lemons. The Eureka lemon is in the back, and the Meyer lemon in front.
The Washington navel hasn't changed very much since I brought it indoors. Except for these:
The tree unexpectedly started to flower around the beginning of December. The fruit BALLOONED out ... by the time I noticed that I had fruit, the largest were the size of marbles. Those fell off, though. The second picture up there are of new oranges about the same size as the first when they were shed.
This tree has been crazy bad about fruit drop.
Most of the fruit ends up looking like this. I have high hopes for at least some oranges from it next year, though. I'm hoping that its eagerness to drop fruit has to do with my watering schedule. I tend to keep my trees a little on the dry side in the winter; I've started to give the Washington navel a little bit of water mid-week to keep it slightly moister. Maybe that will make it want to set fruit.
It could also give the tree foot rot. >:E We'll see.
The Minneola tangelo, which gave me a dozen or so delicious juicy fruit last year, has done exactly nothing this year.
Part of that was due to the unseasonably hot spring we had in early 2007. Right after the trees bloomed and started to set fruit, it shot up to, like, 100 degrees for about two weeks. o.O The hot weather made all the trees drop EVERYTHING. I'd probably have tangelos ripening right now if not for that, cos the tangelo is dead eager to throw out fruit for me.
In early December, the Minneola tangelo started to drop leaves. OH NO I said! It had only dropped, like, 10 when I brought in indoors for the winter, which I thought was awesome ... it is a very sensitive tree, and even a mild shock makes it throw off just about all its foliage. I figured the worst was over, but when I went in there to water it one weekend, the pot was covered in shed leaves.
Well, it turns out that it was nothing to worry about.
The tree was just getting rid of a couple of twigs. Twig dieback is normal in citrus trees - every now and then the tree just decides it doesn't want a particular twig after all, so it drops all the leaves off that twig and the twig dies back to the branch. As long as it doesn't drop more than a couple of twigs, there's nothing to be alarmed about with this. In the spring, I'll cut these dead twigs back to the branches when I do my regular spring pruning.
But you can see why I got alarmed by the sheer number of leaves that fell all at once.
As if to make up for that, the tangelo is putting out some new growth. Kind of unusual for it to grow like this in the winter.
The Washington navel is putting out a little new growth, too.
So is the Meyer lemon. It's like they got into a conference and decided that they all needed to grow a little before spring. It's actually kind of annoying, because the leaves they produce in the winter are huge, floppy things due to the dimness of the light. Even though I have two bright full-spectrum fluorescent lights on the trees, that is NOTHING in comparison with full sunlight. And the sunlight that comes in through the window during the day really doesn't cut it either.
The Eureka lemon, however, is definitely winning the contest. Look how gangly this sucker is! The tree doesn't realize it, but it's going to get a real hard look in the spring when I'm holding the pruning shears. I'm not sure I want all this leggy growth.
The leaf in the middle-right, that looks almost wet, that's the kind of leaf that citrus put out in the winter. You can see how huge it is compared with the normal foliage. The whole branch climbing up the screen on the left is nothing but stuff it started to put out when I brought it indoors.
Here's a better look at the gangly branch. Everything above the arrow is new since November, and you can see the skinny little twig at the top where it is putting out MORE growth.
I can forgive the tree for being retarded, though.
It also likes to give me fruit. :D
The Meyer lemon is probably the least interesting of the bunch, because it almost died last winter and is still recovering. It's also not very photogenic, and I had a hard time getting a shot of it that didn't make it look like a zombie tree. As I predicted, it dropped all of the fruit from that mad flowering spree it had in the fall. It's just as well, since I would have pruned off the fruit anyway.
That's all for the citrus trees, but that's not all that I have in the citrus corner!
You may notice that my Sago palm has a second set of leaves on it. It only had the one set the last time I took a picture of it. I asked if the plant was plastic back then, and I think it got offended because it threw out another set of leaves within two weeks after I made that statement in its hearing. The Sago palm is harumphing at you in this picture.
I have it in with the citrus because it, too, likes very bright light, and the brightest light in the house is under those plant lights.
Grandpa here doesn't like bright light so much, but he's okay with the plant lights. That should tell you just how deadly bright they are (not very). There's just no substitute for real sunlight. Grandpa is holding onto the strings for my miniblinds here. The miniblinds are broken - that's not helping the lighting situation any, but things will be okay until spring. Then I really need new miniblinds.
My fig tree. This tree is about 12 inches tall right now if you don't count the pot. This is the one that was sold to my parents as a "bonsai" but you can clearly see that it does not resemble a miniature adult tree so much as it resembles a sad hacked-off stub struggling for life.
Ironically, if I could get rid of that little stumpy bit in the middle, it would look vaguely bonsai-ish (if the person creating the bonsai were totally incompetent that is). I don't know how to cut that off, though. I may consult my dad in the spring. He has stuff like dremel tools that would minimize the trauma on the tree.
Notice how I keep putting shit off until spring? Pruning the citrus trees really can't be done until April-May-ish, but stuff like trimming this fig tree could be easily done right now cos I never put it outside anyway. This is because I am a procrastinator, and I like to do stuff all at the same time and get it out of the way at once.
That's it for this post. Happy new year, everyone!