(no subject)
Now you have all your stuff. What are you going to do with it?
You're going to mix up your potting mix yourself. It will consist of:
- your basic dirt
- vermiculite
- fertilizer
- water
Take a plastic bag and put it into your pot, and use that to mix up your stuff. Throw in as much dirt as you think you'll need, then a little bit more. Nothing sucks more than to run out of dirt while you're potting.
Add some fertilizer. Citrus like acidic soil; by TOTAL COINCIDENCE, so do azaleas. Azalea fertilizer should contain acidifiers - that's why you bought that, instead of a more general-purpose fertilizer. Toss in some azalea fertilizer, but go easy on it ... how much you're going to put in depends on how much dirt you're mixing up, but I'd say probably no more than one tablespoon per quart of dirt.
Blood meal also acidifies soil, as well as providing gobs of nitrogen. Nitrogen = growth ... nitrogen is the carbohydrate of plant nutrition. It's really hard to go wrong with blood meal. It rots gradually in the soil, so it's almost impossible to burn your plant's roots with it. Note that I said ALMOST. Your plant will not thank you if you bury it in pure blood meal. Add maybe 1/2 cup per quart of dirt.
Add the same quantity of bone meal. Bone meal is mainly phosphorus. Phosphorus is for flowers.
Finally, throw in a generous cup or so of vermiculite.
Add water and mix all of this up thoroughly. If you're not getting your hands dirty, you're not doing it right. It's okay to make it a little soupy ... the excess water will drain out. Mix it up in the bag until everything is completely wet all the way through and all your ingredients are completely blended together.
Now, you want to plant your plant.
Pay close attention to the place at the bottom of the stem where the trunk turns into root. The point of transition is called (confusingly) the crown. You want to plant your plant with the crown just at the surface of the soil. If the crown is underground, your plant will rot and die. If it's aboveground, your plant will find it hard to support itself with its roots. You want the crown right at the surface.
Break up the roots a bit with a pointy stick. Remove any excess dirt from around the roots, and very very gently tease the edges of the root ball to make the root ball more fuzzy, with roots sticking out. Pack some soil into the bottom of the pot and then put your plant's roots on top. Then pack soil around the roots. If you have a lot of roots with no soil between them, use a pointy stick to push dirt into the roots.
You don't want the soil to reach the top of the edges of the pot. The surface of the soil should be at least an inch under the top of the pot. Once you've done this, pack soil up the sides of the pot, so that the plant is sitting inside a sloping depression.
At NO TIME during this process should you let your tree's roots dry out. Cover them with moist paper towels if you find that you're taking awhile.
It is not necessary to add broken pottery or netting to the bottom of the pot to cover the drainage holes before you add dirt. A little soil will fall out the holes, but it won't be a significant amount. In fact, it's important that you do NOT stick something in the bottom, because it's vital that water be able to drain freely.
If your tree seems a little wobbly, you can tie it down. You can use ribbon, cut-up strips of cloth from old clothes, or floral tape; do not use string, or anything that is very thin, as that kind of thing will cut into the trunk. There are several ways to go about staking a tree in a pot:
- the traditional way, of course, is to push sticks into the soil around the edges of the pot and tie the tree to them. This works only if the soil in the pot is firm enough to hold the stakes in place.
- you can also tie one end of your ribbons to the tree, and the other ends to bricks or heavy rocks, which you set down outside the pot on the ground. This method can make moving your tree around a bit of a pain if the rocks are too big to fit inside the pot, but sometimes it's the only way.
- for a very small pot (8 inches or smaller) you can tie the tree to the pot itself. Take a very very long strip of something (cloth or whatever) and loop it around the tree in the middle of the strip. Run both ends of the strip under the bottom of the pot and up the other side, and tie to the tree again with the ends. Do this again perpendicular to the first.
No matter which method you use, make sure the staking is loose enough that the tree can sway a little. Swaying about in the wind is what makes trees strengthen their grip on the ground. You may have to keep a young tree staked for 2 or 3 years until it is solid enough to no longer need staking.
Set your pot outside somewhere in partial shade for a few days then gradually move it out into full sun. It's okay if it gets sun in the morning during the "partial shade" period, but avoid the strong sun of midday during the first 2 or 3 days.
So now you have your tree in a pot. How do you care for it?
Plants need three things to grow:
- sun
- nutrients
- water
Sun is the easiest thing to give citrus trees in the summer, and the hardest in the winter. You simply put them in the sunniest place you have available. In winter, you will need to put them next to your sunniest window AND provide them with a fluorescent plant light (always use fluorescent, as incandescent plant lights produce way too much heat).
Fertilizers come in varying strengths and types, and unless you live in California or Florida, you may have a hard time finding a fertilizer that's formulated especially for citrus.
In absence of a specific-to-citrus fertilizer, granular azalea fertilizer is the best chemical fertilizer for citrus trees. It will make your soil more acid, which changes the way chemical reactions take place within the soil and makes it easier for your tree to take up certain nutrients.
When you buy fertilizer, it will have three numbers on it, like so:
10-10-10
The first number is for nitrogen, the second for phosphorous, the third for potassium. All three are necessary, but the one that is most necessary for citrus trees is nitrogen. Citrus trees also need a lot of iron to be green - this is why I recommend you buy blood meal. It has a lot of nitrogen and a lot of iron.
However, you do need all three of these things.
Feed with azalea granules once every 3 months or so in the summer. Go easy with it ... sprinkle maybe a teaspoon's worth onto the soil surface for an 8-inch pot, and adjust for larger/smaller pots.
Drop in some blood meal and bone meal about once a month while the tree is outside. Be aware that these two types of fertilizer are very organic, and as such they release nutrients by rotting. As they rot, they smell. The smell is not all that strong as long as the plants are outside ... you'll have to stick your nose down into the dirt to smell it. But once you bring them in, the smell of rotting blood meal in an enclosed area can get rank. It can also cause mold to grow on the surface of your soil (if you have this problem, just use a fork to break up the surface and mix it up, and the mold will eventually die). So make sure you stop feeding with bone meal and blood meal no less than a month before you plan to bring the tree inside for the winter.
Don't agonize over how much bone meal and blood meal you add. It's really, really hard to overdo it with these. I put about 1/3rd cup of each on my 5-foot orange trees once a month, and a couple tablespoons onto each 4-year-old lemon tree.
Liquid potassium is great stuff if you can find it, because it rounds out the N-P-K spectrum. I buy Earth Juice, which is 10% potassium by volume. Add 1 capful to a gallon of water and dump onto your plants when watering, no more often than once a week.
I also get liquid seaweed. This is seaweed which has been pureed until it is a smooth liquid. The kind with added iron smells like blood when you open the bottle ... good stuff! One capful per gallon of water is how you use it. You can use this to water your plants (I throw it in at the same time as the liquid potassium) or you can spray it onto the foliage. Both work well. It's excellent for a broad array of trace elements.
These last two might be difficult to find ... I finally located them in Louisville at an organic/hydroponics gardening center called New Earth. I don't really go for hydroponics, but this somewhat odd focus means that they have a lot of cool stuff that your basic Volde*Mart garden center does not.
It's best to feed small quantities, frequently. Once a month for the dry stuff, and once a week for the liquid stuff (which is way more dilute) works very well. In winter, when you bring the tree inside, do not fertilize. The tree will go into a dormant phase, and won't grow ... it's best not to give it food when it doesn't need it.
Stay away from liquid chemical fertilizers. In order to make such fertilizers remain in a liquid form, extra chemicals are added to keep the nutrients in solution. These extra chemicals are bad for your plants, and will slowly build up in the soil until they reach toxic levels and begin to kill the plant. And of course, don't buy Miracle Gro in any form whatsoever.
Water is probably the most problematic issue with citrus. Citrus trees are actually not tropical plants. They are evolved to a dry-ish environment, and absolutely cannot tolerate sitting in wet soil.
You MUST MUST MUST have adequate drainage in your container. While your tree is outside, it should have NOTHING between the drainage holes and the ground. Do not sit it into a saucer; remove any drip tray that might be attached to the container before you pot the plant. If you find that, after it rains, your plant is sitting in a puddle of water, put bricks on the ground and place your container atop the bricks. It is an absolute necessity that excess water can drain freely out the bottom of the container at all times.
This is not to say that you need to let your soil dry out completely. The soil should remain somewhat moist. It's fine for the tree to be rained on a lot ... in fact, that's good for it. If you find that it's being rained on every day, however, you might want to put it under cover for awhile. After getting a good soaking for a couple days, a citrus tree wants to dry out a bit.
Invest in a water meter. This is a little gauge with a long probe, that you stick down into the soil to measure the moisture at the level of the roots. You can't judge by the soil's surface - a moist surface does not necessarily mean a moist interior, and a dry surface definitely doesn't necessarily mean a dry interior. When the water meter reads "low moisture" it's time to water.
Water meters are not expensive, so don't skimp on this vital piece of equipment. To use one, make sure you stick the probe down in where the roots are. Probing dirt around the outside of the roots doesn't do you any good; stick it down into the ground no more than 2 inches away from the trunk for a good reading.
In very hot weather, you may find yourself watering every day. This is fine! Don't fertilize every day, though ... if you are using liquid potassium and liquid seaweed, only add these once a week. In the summer, you can just pour in water until it runs out the bottom, then wait a couple hours, and do this again. The reason for this is that vermiculite takes a little while to absorb water, so you add some, then give it time to suck the water in, then add some more to completely "charge" the flakes of vermiculite.
Try to water in the evenings or mornings. If your plant is wilting, water immediately, of course ... don't wait. But it's best for the plant to not have water dumped on it during the heat of the day.
Whenever possible, allow tap water to sit at least 48 hours before using it to water. This allows chlorine to escape. Chlorine kills plant cells, and while it's not going to hurt anything in small quantities, over time it can cause brown spots on leaves. Fluoride does the same thing, but unfortunately the fluoride in fluoridated water doesn't escape into the air, so there's nothing you can do about this.
In winter, when you bring your tree indoors, set it into a wide saucer to protect your floor from excess water. You'll need to water more carefully in the winter ... make use of your water meter to judge when the plant needs water. Then pour in a small quantity, wait 30 min, pour in another small quantity, and continue until water starts to come out the bottom. Give the plant an hour to absorb water, then make sure you empty the water out of the saucer. Never leave a citrus tree sitting in water! I can't stress this enough!
It's really not as complicated as this may sound. Once you get into the routine of things, it's all very easy, in fact. I make a habit, in the summer, of going out to visit my trees at least once a day, when I check how much water they have and inspect the trees to see how they are growing. It takes about 5 minutes, and if you see this as a chore, then do you really love your tree? Adding stuff to their water takes about 10 minutes. Not hard at all!
You're going to mix up your potting mix yourself. It will consist of:
- your basic dirt
- vermiculite
- fertilizer
- water
Take a plastic bag and put it into your pot, and use that to mix up your stuff. Throw in as much dirt as you think you'll need, then a little bit more. Nothing sucks more than to run out of dirt while you're potting.
Add some fertilizer. Citrus like acidic soil; by TOTAL COINCIDENCE, so do azaleas. Azalea fertilizer should contain acidifiers - that's why you bought that, instead of a more general-purpose fertilizer. Toss in some azalea fertilizer, but go easy on it ... how much you're going to put in depends on how much dirt you're mixing up, but I'd say probably no more than one tablespoon per quart of dirt.
Blood meal also acidifies soil, as well as providing gobs of nitrogen. Nitrogen = growth ... nitrogen is the carbohydrate of plant nutrition. It's really hard to go wrong with blood meal. It rots gradually in the soil, so it's almost impossible to burn your plant's roots with it. Note that I said ALMOST. Your plant will not thank you if you bury it in pure blood meal. Add maybe 1/2 cup per quart of dirt.
Add the same quantity of bone meal. Bone meal is mainly phosphorus. Phosphorus is for flowers.
Finally, throw in a generous cup or so of vermiculite.
Add water and mix all of this up thoroughly. If you're not getting your hands dirty, you're not doing it right. It's okay to make it a little soupy ... the excess water will drain out. Mix it up in the bag until everything is completely wet all the way through and all your ingredients are completely blended together.
Now, you want to plant your plant.
Pay close attention to the place at the bottom of the stem where the trunk turns into root. The point of transition is called (confusingly) the crown. You want to plant your plant with the crown just at the surface of the soil. If the crown is underground, your plant will rot and die. If it's aboveground, your plant will find it hard to support itself with its roots. You want the crown right at the surface.
Break up the roots a bit with a pointy stick. Remove any excess dirt from around the roots, and very very gently tease the edges of the root ball to make the root ball more fuzzy, with roots sticking out. Pack some soil into the bottom of the pot and then put your plant's roots on top. Then pack soil around the roots. If you have a lot of roots with no soil between them, use a pointy stick to push dirt into the roots.
You don't want the soil to reach the top of the edges of the pot. The surface of the soil should be at least an inch under the top of the pot. Once you've done this, pack soil up the sides of the pot, so that the plant is sitting inside a sloping depression.
At NO TIME during this process should you let your tree's roots dry out. Cover them with moist paper towels if you find that you're taking awhile.
It is not necessary to add broken pottery or netting to the bottom of the pot to cover the drainage holes before you add dirt. A little soil will fall out the holes, but it won't be a significant amount. In fact, it's important that you do NOT stick something in the bottom, because it's vital that water be able to drain freely.
If your tree seems a little wobbly, you can tie it down. You can use ribbon, cut-up strips of cloth from old clothes, or floral tape; do not use string, or anything that is very thin, as that kind of thing will cut into the trunk. There are several ways to go about staking a tree in a pot:
- the traditional way, of course, is to push sticks into the soil around the edges of the pot and tie the tree to them. This works only if the soil in the pot is firm enough to hold the stakes in place.
- you can also tie one end of your ribbons to the tree, and the other ends to bricks or heavy rocks, which you set down outside the pot on the ground. This method can make moving your tree around a bit of a pain if the rocks are too big to fit inside the pot, but sometimes it's the only way.
- for a very small pot (8 inches or smaller) you can tie the tree to the pot itself. Take a very very long strip of something (cloth or whatever) and loop it around the tree in the middle of the strip. Run both ends of the strip under the bottom of the pot and up the other side, and tie to the tree again with the ends. Do this again perpendicular to the first.
No matter which method you use, make sure the staking is loose enough that the tree can sway a little. Swaying about in the wind is what makes trees strengthen their grip on the ground. You may have to keep a young tree staked for 2 or 3 years until it is solid enough to no longer need staking.
Set your pot outside somewhere in partial shade for a few days then gradually move it out into full sun. It's okay if it gets sun in the morning during the "partial shade" period, but avoid the strong sun of midday during the first 2 or 3 days.
So now you have your tree in a pot. How do you care for it?
Plants need three things to grow:
- sun
- nutrients
- water
Sun is the easiest thing to give citrus trees in the summer, and the hardest in the winter. You simply put them in the sunniest place you have available. In winter, you will need to put them next to your sunniest window AND provide them with a fluorescent plant light (always use fluorescent, as incandescent plant lights produce way too much heat).
Fertilizers come in varying strengths and types, and unless you live in California or Florida, you may have a hard time finding a fertilizer that's formulated especially for citrus.
In absence of a specific-to-citrus fertilizer, granular azalea fertilizer is the best chemical fertilizer for citrus trees. It will make your soil more acid, which changes the way chemical reactions take place within the soil and makes it easier for your tree to take up certain nutrients.
When you buy fertilizer, it will have three numbers on it, like so:
10-10-10
The first number is for nitrogen, the second for phosphorous, the third for potassium. All three are necessary, but the one that is most necessary for citrus trees is nitrogen. Citrus trees also need a lot of iron to be green - this is why I recommend you buy blood meal. It has a lot of nitrogen and a lot of iron.
However, you do need all three of these things.
Feed with azalea granules once every 3 months or so in the summer. Go easy with it ... sprinkle maybe a teaspoon's worth onto the soil surface for an 8-inch pot, and adjust for larger/smaller pots.
Drop in some blood meal and bone meal about once a month while the tree is outside. Be aware that these two types of fertilizer are very organic, and as such they release nutrients by rotting. As they rot, they smell. The smell is not all that strong as long as the plants are outside ... you'll have to stick your nose down into the dirt to smell it. But once you bring them in, the smell of rotting blood meal in an enclosed area can get rank. It can also cause mold to grow on the surface of your soil (if you have this problem, just use a fork to break up the surface and mix it up, and the mold will eventually die). So make sure you stop feeding with bone meal and blood meal no less than a month before you plan to bring the tree inside for the winter.
Don't agonize over how much bone meal and blood meal you add. It's really, really hard to overdo it with these. I put about 1/3rd cup of each on my 5-foot orange trees once a month, and a couple tablespoons onto each 4-year-old lemon tree.
Liquid potassium is great stuff if you can find it, because it rounds out the N-P-K spectrum. I buy Earth Juice, which is 10% potassium by volume. Add 1 capful to a gallon of water and dump onto your plants when watering, no more often than once a week.
I also get liquid seaweed. This is seaweed which has been pureed until it is a smooth liquid. The kind with added iron smells like blood when you open the bottle ... good stuff! One capful per gallon of water is how you use it. You can use this to water your plants (I throw it in at the same time as the liquid potassium) or you can spray it onto the foliage. Both work well. It's excellent for a broad array of trace elements.
These last two might be difficult to find ... I finally located them in Louisville at an organic/hydroponics gardening center called New Earth. I don't really go for hydroponics, but this somewhat odd focus means that they have a lot of cool stuff that your basic Volde*Mart garden center does not.
It's best to feed small quantities, frequently. Once a month for the dry stuff, and once a week for the liquid stuff (which is way more dilute) works very well. In winter, when you bring the tree inside, do not fertilize. The tree will go into a dormant phase, and won't grow ... it's best not to give it food when it doesn't need it.
Stay away from liquid chemical fertilizers. In order to make such fertilizers remain in a liquid form, extra chemicals are added to keep the nutrients in solution. These extra chemicals are bad for your plants, and will slowly build up in the soil until they reach toxic levels and begin to kill the plant. And of course, don't buy Miracle Gro in any form whatsoever.
Water is probably the most problematic issue with citrus. Citrus trees are actually not tropical plants. They are evolved to a dry-ish environment, and absolutely cannot tolerate sitting in wet soil.
You MUST MUST MUST have adequate drainage in your container. While your tree is outside, it should have NOTHING between the drainage holes and the ground. Do not sit it into a saucer; remove any drip tray that might be attached to the container before you pot the plant. If you find that, after it rains, your plant is sitting in a puddle of water, put bricks on the ground and place your container atop the bricks. It is an absolute necessity that excess water can drain freely out the bottom of the container at all times.
This is not to say that you need to let your soil dry out completely. The soil should remain somewhat moist. It's fine for the tree to be rained on a lot ... in fact, that's good for it. If you find that it's being rained on every day, however, you might want to put it under cover for awhile. After getting a good soaking for a couple days, a citrus tree wants to dry out a bit.
Invest in a water meter. This is a little gauge with a long probe, that you stick down into the soil to measure the moisture at the level of the roots. You can't judge by the soil's surface - a moist surface does not necessarily mean a moist interior, and a dry surface definitely doesn't necessarily mean a dry interior. When the water meter reads "low moisture" it's time to water.
Water meters are not expensive, so don't skimp on this vital piece of equipment. To use one, make sure you stick the probe down in where the roots are. Probing dirt around the outside of the roots doesn't do you any good; stick it down into the ground no more than 2 inches away from the trunk for a good reading.
In very hot weather, you may find yourself watering every day. This is fine! Don't fertilize every day, though ... if you are using liquid potassium and liquid seaweed, only add these once a week. In the summer, you can just pour in water until it runs out the bottom, then wait a couple hours, and do this again. The reason for this is that vermiculite takes a little while to absorb water, so you add some, then give it time to suck the water in, then add some more to completely "charge" the flakes of vermiculite.
Try to water in the evenings or mornings. If your plant is wilting, water immediately, of course ... don't wait. But it's best for the plant to not have water dumped on it during the heat of the day.
Whenever possible, allow tap water to sit at least 48 hours before using it to water. This allows chlorine to escape. Chlorine kills plant cells, and while it's not going to hurt anything in small quantities, over time it can cause brown spots on leaves. Fluoride does the same thing, but unfortunately the fluoride in fluoridated water doesn't escape into the air, so there's nothing you can do about this.
In winter, when you bring your tree indoors, set it into a wide saucer to protect your floor from excess water. You'll need to water more carefully in the winter ... make use of your water meter to judge when the plant needs water. Then pour in a small quantity, wait 30 min, pour in another small quantity, and continue until water starts to come out the bottom. Give the plant an hour to absorb water, then make sure you empty the water out of the saucer. Never leave a citrus tree sitting in water! I can't stress this enough!
It's really not as complicated as this may sound. Once you get into the routine of things, it's all very easy, in fact. I make a habit, in the summer, of going out to visit my trees at least once a day, when I check how much water they have and inspect the trees to see how they are growing. It takes about 5 minutes, and if you see this as a chore, then do you really love your tree? Adding stuff to their water takes about 10 minutes. Not hard at all!