Yesterday I posted a video on pruning a lime tree:
I enjoy pruning fruit trees. You can see the pruning before and after in the video – it’s night and day.
With citrus I generally don’t cut too much unless the tree is really a mess. I took about 1/4 of this tree without messing up the structure.
What I do is look for crossing branches that are jamming through the middle, then take those out. I also remove any sick or dead branches. Fruit is usually produced on branches that get the sun. Getting rid of the unproductive crossing branches and the lower shoots redirects the tree’s effort to growing what you want: fruit!
As for feeding citrus organically, it’s not that easy. Citrus are actually a bit picky and the commercial guys feed them heavily with lots and lots of chemical fertilizer, as I outline in this post. Compost and compost tea work, but they take time. They also seem to like chop-and-drop, though some people warn against mulching citrus trees.
In the video, I throw down seaweed, water hyacinth and water lettuce. I got the latter two plants from the retention pond and the seaweed from the beach about two hundred feet from where I filmed the video.
If this doesn’t do it, we’ll look at supplemental feeding. The location has no compost at this point so I’m starting from zero.
2 comments
Very helpful, thanks. Looking at taking over some land in Costa Rica previously used for commercial citrus production as a permaculture homestead. Any thoughts on how to best approach that? Was think we could use the existing trees as sun protection while other trees are young and then eventually chop and drop some of the citrus as things fill in. I did read your citrus guild post (and bought a couple books) which has been really helpful, but would be curious if you have any experience with regenerating a citrus grove.
I do not have experience there, but I would clear out the vines and weeds and prune the trees well, removing the bad ones and sick specimens. Then I would plant different varieties of trees around them.