Citrus Grafting

[PatrickW]

Anyone know anything about grafting citrus trees?

I've never done any grafting, but am jumping off the deep end this year. I'm going to give some apples a try, but this blog post gave me the idea to try citrus:

athinkingstomach.blogspot.com/2010/01/mandarin-mania.html

Christina mentioned a russian mandarin called Shirokolistvennyi that tasted good and was very cold hardy. If it grows in Russia, in theory it should grow in Amsterdam. I also tracked down a locally available rootstock that's also very cold hardy: Poncirus trifoliata.

It turns out GRIN has some scion wood of Shirokolistvennyi they can send me.

Anyone care to tell me I'm crazy trying to get mandarins to grow in Amsterdam, at about the same latitude as the US/Canadian border?

Anyone have any experience with this kind of thing?

[mjc]

Trifolate orange...the tree from hell. Extremely thorny, very cold hardy (yeah it grows around me and places it gets colder), extremely sour fruit and MAKE SURE that you never, ever, ever (did I mention never?) let it set fruit because it's more prolific than a Tribble...other than that...it makes a good cold hardy rootstock.

Climate-wise you are closer to the Carolinas than to New York, so you should be able to grow some of the hardier Mandarins and possibly even others, outdoors in protected location or with some of them, not so protected. So, no you aren't ready to be locked up in a padded room, yet...

[orflo]

I have some citrus trees over here , I don't risk to leave these in the greenhouse during wintertime and I bring them in. I know someone who tried to graft some lemons and clementines, and possibly also oranges to poncirus, the grafting did do well, but the trees were not cold hardy (poncirus is, no problem, adn the don't reseed as much over here as in for instance Italy or the south of France). The main problem for my citrus plants is not the cold (I can shelter these by bringing them in) but the lack of light at our 51° north, and you're even a bit further up north. There used to be a guy in Siberia wo grew citrus fruits under a double layer of plastic, protecting them against the cold.
And beware: Russia is very big, and some spots are much warmer than the western European climate!

[canadamike]

I agree with Frank here. There problem would not be so much extreme cold for the trees but for the buds, they tend to dessicate. Mandarin grafted on poncirus can work well, I have seen a 10 feet high one in my friend's house, but supplementary light was also provided. I sure would try kumquats if I was you...

I also have had the pleasure to eat very ripe calamondin orange on the tree in Florida, and they are not bad at all and sure would make the heck of a good marmelade...

[castanea]

It came to the US in 1999 as PI 654859 from

Andrew Harty, Kerifresh Ltd.,
Waipapa Road, RD 2,
Kerikeri, New Zealand.

www.citrusvariety.ucr.edu/citrus/shiro.html

But they have no data about cold hardiness because it's not an issue here. The blog just mentions that it can take a hard freeze. That doesn't mean much because many mandarins take hard freezes. Many can handle temperatures down in the low 20s F and even high teens. Calamondins can handle temps in the high teens.

This link also says it is very cold hardy but doesn't give specific temperatures:

ceventura.ucdavis.edu/newsletterfiles/Topics_in_Subtropics7541.pdf

[PatrickW]

It's rare for it to get below -10C (15F) here, although -15C (5F) is probably possible. I guess if it gets really cold, I'll have to think about protecting it somehow. The rootstock I'm using is supposed to be good to -20C (-5F).

Even if the plant survives those temps, I can imagine the fruit itself may be a totally different story. Am I right the fruit starts to ripen in December? We very rarely have hard frosts until January or so. By December there have usually only been a few light frosts. Darkness will be an issue by then. We simply don't get much light in the winter.

A Russian friend of mine said she would search the Internet for the variety name in the Russian language, although I understand the name translates to 'Wide Mandarin', so I don't know if that'll be useful or not...

[orflo]

If this one comes from Kerikeri... hmmm, no frosts over there (I've been there, saw some loquats, lots of avocados, guavas, even some banana trees, cherimoyas,...and I did see some mandarines, but nobody was around to give me names).
Citrus plants have the ability to flower on any date, my lemon tree (standing in the warm living room) is flowering right now, in the middle of the winter. These lemons will be ready for harvest by September-october (they can be kept on the tree for some months after ripening). Unfortunately, my experience with the two clementine varieties I have is different: they need more time to get their fruits to ripen off, I never noted the dates, but I think it takes more than one year for them to go from flower to ripe fruits. I have one orange, and this one is quicker, it just takes about as long as the lemons. I must say here that the clementines are the hardest ones of the citrus fruits I have, they get sick, don't grow abundantly, and so on...But maybe this satsuma will do better, satsumas are more cold hardy, but the closest place where any citrus tree stands winter without protection must be the South of France, near Menton...And that's just a completely different climate...

[orflo]

I don't know if this one is still alive, it could be promising to have some scion wood from it:
www.saalfelds.freeserve.co.uk/chelsea.htm

[castanea]

The fact that NZ folks bothered to import it from Russia and that Americans bothered to import it from NZ, suggests that it probably produces a tasty fruit.

[PatrickW]

What I've now read a couple of places is you can have citurs that tastes good, and you can have cold hardy citrus, but you can't have good tasting cold hardy citrus. What castanea just said has really peaked my interest. This does seem to be a variety that both tastes good and is winter hardy. I've read it's sweet, which makes sense, because the sugar probably adds to it's ability to resist frosts.

Frank, I'll bet your living room smells great if you have a lemon tree blooming in it right now!

In terms of doing the graft, does anyone have suggestions on where I should do it? Indoors, in an unheated greenhouse or outdoors? The guy at GRIN said he would send it in a few weeks, and the weather is pretty cold right now. Indoors the warmth may stimulate unwanted growth, but outdoors or in an unheated greenhouse it may freeze. I'm also having a problem with aphids right now indoors. It's also pretty dry indoors right now.

[PatrickW]

My Russian friend just got back to me with more information on this variety.

She says the name is also Unshiu Shirokolistnyi or Gruzinskiy Shirokolistnyi (which means Georgian Wide Leaved), and so is from the Caucasus and not Russia. She said there isn't any indication it is still in commercial production.

She said there's no mention of unusual frost hardiness anywhere, but this variety does tolerate low light levels, at the possible expense of low yield. This tree apparently does not appreciate warm summers, and prefers temperatures below 25C and dry air. Perhaps this is where the claim of cold hardiness came from. She said what she reads in general is that at -5C it can sustain damage, and will likely die at -10C, but again this is not in specific reference to this variety.

She sent me some links in Russian that I haven't looked at yet, for those of you who want to use Google language tools...

floralworld.ru/encyclopedia/plants/Citrus.html

nature-home.ru/statyi/st9.html

www.forum.homecitrus.ru/index.php?showtopic=113

www.pofig.com/forum/thread25828.html