The Tropical Fruit Forum

I just received my Santa Teresa lemon tree from Four Winds. 1. What is their “semi-dwarfing” rootstock?
2. To what degree F is this lemon tree hardy to? I’m planning on keeping it indoors in pot forever assuming it can’t handle temps below freezing.

I planted a seedling Changsha back in 2012. It’s now at least 13 feet tall, and just produced its first three fruits this year. My fruit had 25 seeds, and I planted them.

All I know is the thermo cube is basically a switch plugged into a wall socket or an extension cord and when the temperature around it gets to 35 degrees, the switch allows electricity to flow to whatever device you have plugged into it. You could plug a lamp, a toaster, a hair dryer, a radio, a space heater, a shop light, I imagine an infrared heat lamp, anything you want. I plugged shop light with a purple reptile heat bulb into it and it worked but the bulb busted due to condensation on the glass bulb being cold and then the heat shattered the glass. I’d just hope the infrared bulb, if glass, won’t shatter in an outside humid environment.

This is the citradia fruit from same tree last year.

You can get a thermo cube from Tractor Supply or a similar thermostatic device for under $15 at Lowe’s. Or online. I plug my heaters into a thermo cube at beginning of winter and let it protect the trees for me while knowing I’m not wasting as much electricity or possibly over heating my trees and causing them to break dormancy. My only labor for the trees after winterizing them is watering at least once a week and opening and closing the door on enclosure to vent when not freezing temps, again to prevent overheating and breaking dormancy.

What causes some citranges to sometimes be lobed and sometimes smooth spheres? These are Benton and citradia at the Southeastern Citrus Expo in Bolivia, NC today.

I tried shop lights under some young trees that I’d surrounded with plastic over wire cages years ago. Tried reptile purple heat lamp bulbs. I found unfortunately that half the time I would find the bulbs shattered the next morning; I think the bulbs got condensation on them and froze and when they came on, heated up, and shattered. I’m done with light bulb heat and just do space heaters with fans to circulate air.

Thanks Ilya11 for posting again about letting the oil settle out of juice in refrigerator over night. It’s been a while since I saw your other post about that,  and I thought the oil rose to the top, but I guess I remembered wrong. I tried letting it settle in refrigerator last year but didn’t notice the dramatic separation that your juice showed. I’ll try again next year if I get fruit.

Cindy, I researched several different recipes and didn’t feel right about any one particular recipe, but I ended up taking elements of what I wanted from that eat the weeds one you mentioned, but ultimately used the Sure-jell recipe as the foundational guide. I liked the idea of 5.5 cups sugar to 4 cups fruit better than 4 cups sugar to 4 cups fruit.

I peeled only part of each fruit using a potato peeler, only stripping off pretty yellow parts of peel and leaving the dark spotted portion. I used a pearing knife to filet the white pith from the strips of peel, then finely chopped peels. I only ended up with about half a cup of finely chopped peel. I boiled the chopped peel for 20 minutes with 1/8 teaspoon baking soda in 2.5 cups water, then pored off two cups of the water which ended up being all of the water since half cup of water evaporated. Poncirus does have a different taste than other citrus but I like the smell of the fruit and honestly don’t find the distinctive taste offensive, but I don’t like the resin that sticks to my teeth if I try to eat it out of hand. Removing seeds is easily done by cutting the fruit in half and just using the knife to pop the seeds out of the half fruit and put them in a bowl to discard in trash. Then I used a citrus reamer to extract the juice and pulp from each halved fruit. As the reamer filled with pulp, I scoop the pulp into a measuring cup and dumped the juice into a jar. I meant to let the juice sit in the refrigerator for a day to let the poncirus oil to rise to the top so I could discard the oil and have sweeter juice; however, I decided I didn’t have time to wait , do I just added the juice to pulp and boiled and simmered it for 10 minutes, added pectin, then sugar, boiled for a minute, removed from heat, and canned it like any other jam. The marmalade does have what I consider a rosy-like poncirus flavor but not bitter and really is just a strong orange flavor with a subtle rose-like quality, is the best I can describe it.  I’m glad I can actually use the poncirus fruit, and don’t have to strive to keep citranges alive to try to make decent marmalade.

My trifoliata trees finally produced enough fruit for me to try making marmalade and it turned out to be surprisingly good! I basically followed the sure-jell recipe but pored off the boiled water from the chopped peels and just added the peels to the fruit pulp/ juice. It ended up being 2.75 cups of pulp/juice and 1.25 cups of water, sure-jell, 5.5 cups of sugar. The final product tastes like a strong yet sweet orange marmalade with no bitterness. There was no resin sticking to my teeth after eating the marmalade either. I just used standard poncirus trifoliata fruit for this batch, not the flying dragon.

My nansho dai dai died back almost to the ground every winter even with protection in a high tunnel and finally died completely when I took the tunnel down. The only hybrids that came back from roots without protection two winters ago was citradia and Thomasville.

The trash cans are filled with well water or rainwater in late October and dumped out in spring in early May. The sun is supposed to heat the water in black cans during day and the water in the cans provides heat to the enclosure during freezing temperatures. As water freezes it gives off some heat. The volume of water in enclosure also means less air space for my electric space heaters to heat when the thermo cubes turn them on when temperature gets to 35 degrees.