citrus tree question

[Jenn]

That's really a lot of good information ~misfit~. Thanks!

[Hypatia Nachshon]

Kol HaKavod (good job) Shaun. I'm very impressed by your daring & initiative in traversing such a potential minefield with the success that you report!

Hypatia

[~misfit~]

You're welcome. :)

One thing I recently learned - if you use neem oil try to keep it away from tender young growth. I'm new to neem oil and rather foolishly saturated the young growth on some of my freshly-grafted citrus trees as I had an aphid 'bloom' just after some of my newly-grafted buds started moving. Most of those shoots have stopped growing and the Meyer has started dropping the tender leaves that I sprayed three weeks ago.

Now I search more thouroughly I see that a very few artciles on the use of neem oil do warn about it. Shame I didn't see that earlier, a couple of new grafts are teetering on the egde.

[~misfit~]

Thank you kindly Hypatia. It's not all success but I try to only make mistakes once. ;)

[~misfit~]

I was looking on NZs version of ebay this morning and was reminded of something citrus-related;

This season I've started replacing my previous full-sized citrus with trees grafted onto dwarf rootstock, doing most of the grafting myself. There was a seller on the site who odered Flying Dragon rootstock for me after I explained that I didn't just want to buy new trees, I prefered to graft my existing trees onto dwarfing rootstock so I don't have to fight their natural urge to grow taller than my containers can accomodate.

To that end I sent him a pic of one of my orange trees, showing him how I had to tie it to the railing on the deck to prevent the wind blowing it over. I lay down on the deck beside the pot to take the pic. He was so impressed with my tree he asked me if he could use the picture of it in his listings.

It can be seen here;

It's the second pic, click on the first to enlarge it then hit the 'next' arrow. :)