The Tropical Fruit Forum

I hope any changeover wouldn't affect all prior links to the site.
(Example, somebody links to a certain thread, it might have been in a post 2 years ago, and then it no longer works for someone who's going back looking at that post, which is actually more common than you'd think)

I agree with Cookie Monster. There's an ethical point of view to be argued that this isn't really stealing.

It goes deep down into philosophical issues about where rights originate.

This topic came up in another thread, and I'd like to discuss how to use Yuzu.
First I want to say Yuzu is a wonderful unique citrus, with a unique flavor. But those who do not know how to properly use Yuzu may not be able to appreciate it.

I never found a good use for yuzu & cut both my trees down.

And you never bothered to do any research to see how Yuzu fruit are used?

Sure I did, and still couldn't find a use for them. I'm not going to float them in the bath & as far as a good tasting citrus, it isn't.

Yuzu is definitely not a fruit for direct out of hand eating.

I slice up a Yuzu, remove all the seeds (there's a lot of them but it's not difficult because the seeds are so big), then chop up the fruits further and cook them into a citrus marmalade sauce to spread over fish. With Yuzu there's no need to remove the rinds, indeed there wouldn't be that much useable part of the fruit left if you did so. The rinds have a lot of flavor, and are a lot more tender, less bitter, and more edible than lemon or orange rinds would be.
This isn't unusual. Sometimes mandarin peels and even orange peels are used in stir fries in Chinese cuisine, mostly to impart flavor but it won't hurt if you eat some of it. However the rinds of Yuzu are much more edible.
Not quite like the kumquats but I would say they are only a little less tender than mandarinquats.
I actually enjoy taking a few table out of the peel of a fresh Yuzu.

Yuzu is most typically used for flavoring. It's really in good in Japanese-style ponzu sauces for dipping.
Typically the entire fruits are crushed, with the juice and essential oils from the rind collected. (It would probably be even better flavor wise to remove the seeds first before crushing but that would add more work)
There's not a huge amount of juice inside a Yuzu, and this is in large part because there are so many large seeds.

Yuzu kosho is great on egg rolls or omelettes. Yuzu is also good in salad dressings.

Also good for soba (buckwheat) noodles or Japanese noodle bowls with fish.

Lemon juice can substitute for Yuzu in most recipes but the flavor is just not the same.

Also there are some great recipes for candied Yuzu peel, which are much like candied citron.
You could even bake these into a cake, and I have a great tasting recipe for Yuzu blueberry muffins.

If you're still not sold on Yuzu, you might see this video for inspiration:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdUq2AVLEn8

I'm sure Yuzu has (or could have) all sorts of other culinary uses as well.

Yuzu may be able to survive in Portland, Oregon, if it is planted outside as a mature tree in April.
(If you try planting it out in March the temperatures may still be too cold and it will go into shock if it is adjusting from warm growing conditions inside)

I never found a good use for yuzu & cut both my trees down.

And you never bothered to do any research to see how Yuzu fruit are used?
 

There are a lot of people in colder climates who would like to grow a lime tree. Unfortunately for them, and something almost none of them realize, limes are the very least hardy out of all the citrus groups commonly sold in a supermarket. If you wanted to try pushing the boundaries and see if a citrus tree might be able to survive in your marginal climate, a lime tree would be the very last thing you'd want to try.

But that being said, Kaffir lime is not actually a true lime.
Regular limes descend from an ancestor called Citrus micrantha, which has very little tolerance to cold. Kaffir limes, on the other hand, descend from a different ancestral species, Khasi papeda (Citrus latipes ) which grows a bit further inland at a bit higher elevation.

This citrus species, C. latipes (Swingle) Yu. Tanaka is locally called as Soh Kymphor by the Khasi tribe of Meghalaya. This fruit is bitter sour in taste and commonly consumed raw. But, in a few local Khasi villages of Laitjem and Sadew, this fruit is eaten between meals, usually blended with finely cut tender leaves of mustard or radish with chillies, sugar and salt to taste.
Here are a few traditional uses of this plant:
The leaves of this citrus plant are boiled in water until the water turns green. Then this water is used for bathing, to relieve body aches, fever, common cold and headache.
The citrus fruit is peeled and boiled in water, then it is cooled and strained using muslin cloth and stored. This decoction is used by diluting it with water and consumed orally to cure stomach disorders, constipation and skin problems. It is also applied to heal chapped and dry skin.
The juice of the fruit is mixed with mustard oil and used as balm on the forehead and the nose during a fever or cold, to lower the body temperature. It also acts as an antiseptic when applied to cuts and wounds. 

https://explorers.zizira.com/wild-citrus-fruits-meghalaya-uses/

If you look at the leaves of Kaffir lime, they have huge winged petioles that are very reminiscent of Citrus Ichangensis (a notoriously cold hardy species). I don't know but this suggests there might be a distant relation. (Now of course this doesn't prove cold hardiness. Citrus micrantha itself also has fairly large winged petioles and is the last thing from cold hardy.)
(Note: I don't believe the C. latipes in the UCR collection is fully representative of the species in the wild, in terms of leaf shape)

This is a botanical drawing of Kaffir lime, note the leaf shape:


[another little thing I'll point out about the difference between C. micrantha and C. latipes is that C. micrantha has off the charts levels of furanocoumarins, which no doubt explains why lime juice is so photosensitizing; whereas Kaffir lime has only extremely low levels by comparison, based on this one fact alone one could infer different ancestry]

I've seen various different sources, some listing Kaffir lime as zone 10 (like most ordinary citrus) and some indicating it can survive down to zone 9.
The very fact it could be grown in zone 9 would indicate it is much hardier than ordinary limes.

Kaffir lime is rather a less common variety, so I'd imagine there hasn't been a lot of experimentation investigating whether it can survive in marginal climates. Probably most everyone just assumes it is going to be like any other ordinary citrus.

I suspect however that Kaffir lime might have a similar level of cold hardiness to Meyer lemon.
(And if that's the case there is a possibility it might be able to survive outside in urban areas of Vancouver, B.C., but I'm getting ahead of myself)

This entire thread is very speculative.


A comment left in a discussion about Kaffir lime:
________________________________________________
December 21, 2010, jbwaters from Dallas, TX wrote:

I love this plant. I have had one in a pot for about 12 years now and it is still thriving. Mine fruits and I have been extremely successful with starting new ones from seeds -- i plant them directly from the fruit into moist soil -- about 95% sprouted and are either in the ground or given as gifts. In the summer, I have mine in dappled to direct sun until late afternoon and have positioned it so that I can see the Giant Swallowtails laying their eggs on it from my kitchen window-- their ceterpillars look like bird droppings. My tree is easily big enough to share with them. It doesn't seems to like our Texas sun as much as my Satsuma Orange does.

And despite the fact that the kaffir lime shouldn't survive freezing temps, I planted one in a slightly protected area near my house and despite records snows in Dallas, TX last year (12 inches over night that lasted with well below freezing temps for several days), the kaffir lime tree came back! They got about 2 feet tall with very little water or attention. So this year I planted more in the ground to see how they would do. My fruiting tree stays in the pot though as she is a rare thing to find and stays in the greenhouse once we hit 40 degrees until we are reliably in the 50s.
________________________________________________
https://davesgarden.com/guides/pf/go/67460/#b


The leaves of Kaffir lime are very useful for cooking with in Southeast Asian cuisine, used much the same way that bay leaves are.
(Unlike the leaves of other citrus, kaffir lime leaves are very mild and don't have the characteristic harsh astringency of other citrus leaves, which is probably reflective of its papeda ancestry)
The fruits, on the other hand, are much lower quality than normal limes, though not terrible (they just have somewhat less of the characteristic lime flavor, and a very slight amount of bitterness), but the fruits are sometimes valued for the zest that comes from the rinds. The zest is better than that which would come from regular limes.

The peels also have a slight musky aroma that reminds me of my grandparent's basement (in a good way).

These are some pictures of a Citrange growing in the Philadelphia area, outside unprotected.
Supposedly this variety is actually a cross between a Mandarin and a Citrange.
It was planted in 2003. It died back one winter a few years ago and has probably since died completely in the severe 2017/2018 winter.



It's semi-evergreen, meaning only maybe 20 percent of the leaves yellow in fall.
There are thorns in there too. Some of the leaves appear to be trifoliate.
The first fruits appeared in 2007, and there were three fruits that year. The next year there were twelve, and thirteen fruits the year after that.



The fruits even get a chance to ripen to nice glossy orange. They contain plenty of seeds.
Unfortunately they taste bitter and sour, not very edible.



This is just a repost of an old thread from another forum:
http://www.philadelphiaspeaks.com/threads/my-citrandarin-tree.7372/#post-121801

I don't know if there's any chance this tree could have been a Dimicelli.
The original post said his tree was a cross between a Mandarin and Citrange.
I have a Dimicelli seedling and from the research I've been able to dig up about it it supposedly came from a cross between Temple orange and poncirus, which was then crossed with a Clementine.

Yuzu has sometimes been claimed to survive 0 F but I think that's only under ideal conditions and for very brief times.
I'm thinking at the least it's going to suffer a bit of damage, although Yuzu is really good at recovering from damage.

From the research I've looked into in the past, 10 F would be a better description for Yuzu's cold hardiness rating. (And even at 10 F it can suffer some light damage, although at 14 or 15 F it is completely unfazed)

US 852, which a hybrid between Changsha mandarin and trifoliate, can survive 0 F, is tolerably edible, although it does still have a little bit of the trifoliate taste.

This is just from memory, but from research I've looked into in the past it is possible.
Vanilla orchid can grow in Southern California but it requires a spot under a patio, or other ideal spot, where it will get mostly shade, and needs to be planted in a spot that has some humidity, like from lots of other surrounding plants that get watered often.
You're going to have to create the right microclimate where it won't get baked in the sun and dry out.
It's also going to need to be surrounded, to avoid winds blowing through and drying things out. But the spot can't be completely shaded or cold all the time, and at least a little bit of sunlight has to be able to filter down onto the plant.

For anyone who's ever tried to grow gardenias or raspberries in Southern California, you know what I mean.

The mangosteens in the large fabric containers are doing well.



There's even some new leaf growth (the red leaves at the top).

The other mangosteens do not appear to be doing as well.

I wonder if citrandarins like US852 are  better choice for such large scale testings. I guess 5-10 mother plants will give sufficient quantities of starting seeds.

Yes, US 852 is a hybrid between Changsha mandarin (already pretty hardy) and trifoliate, and can survive well into zone 7.

Apparently their flavor isn't too terrible. There's a video where one guy is managing to enjoy eating them.

Here's my Arctic Frost.

It was growing inside and then I planted it outside too early in March before the tree had time to be acclimated to the cold outside (it did not go below freezing though) and much of the top died back. It later started growing back.

This picture is from July:


This picture is from today (Jan 26) :


It lost all its leaves except two, and they both look a pale lime green. It looks like it may be able to come back though.
It probably would have done better had so much of the tree not died back in March (which was due to sudden transfer from warm growing conditions inside to a cold outside before it had time to become acclimatized). All those dead branches you see in the second picture had already died back in March, before the first picture was taken.

Olympia, WA, zone 8a


Incidentally I have a Satsuma that looks much better right now (but it's not a fair comparison, and the Satsuma was also covered with a frame until early January when the winds tore off the frame).