The Tropical Fruit Forum

Thank you for sharing! I have been interested in this very topic for the last year, so this piece was very insightful!

I find the peels a bit bitter in most usage, but dried and powdered they're a nice addition to lots of kinds of spice blends. I'm surprised at the low seediness, and I wonder if that's a varietal difference or an environmental one. So delighted to hear there's suppliers popping up in the US!

I have grown shikuwasa isolated and I have produced seedless fruits in the past. So it definitely can be an environmental difference. I have seen the same in sudachi.

Did your yuzu flower yet? My seed grown yuzu flowered last spring at six years after sowing. It basically maxed out it's height in three seasons, branched out at the top in the following two (it looked like a ridiculous broom for a time) and finally flowered at the top from those side branches in the last season. From six flowers, two yielded mature fruits. I am excited to see how many flower buds it produces this year.

Unfortunately not yet. I have a couple trees that have multiple stems reaching 2,5 - 3m. The trees have brached out a bit, but not at the top. I am hoping to see some flowers this year.

Hi, I found this website selling kabosu, yuzu and sudachi, which sound be frost-resistant. They are always very seedy.

I can also make you cuttings for carrizo rootstock, and shikuwasa and sudachi.

Yuzu is in season right now, if that qualifies. Plenty of websites are selling it at the moment

Thanks for the info. @deRoode, did you also take cuttings during hot months?

I used cuttings coming from plants actively growing at 23 °C to 29°C. Material that was semi hardened worked best for me.

Have you tried to root FD cuttings? If so, was it easy?

I have rooted FD with quite a high succes rate. I used substrate plugs (some kind of cocos type plug). You can root them in a plastic container under LED at 23°C constant. First time it took around 6-8 weeks for most of them to root, significantly longer than other varieties. Using material from actively growing plants gave much better succes rates.

For those who are interested, I was to be able to visit Japan last December. During the trip I was lucky to find many different Japanese citrus.

Yuzu harvest season had just ended. You could find yuzu at any major grocery store, and often Kabosu and Sudachi as well.


Premium yuzu at 3€ each



Kabosu grown in Tokyo. The owner, an old coffee lady, insisted that the flowers attract many swallowtail butterflies each year.



In Tokyo I found many antenna shops. These shops represent a single prefecture. A great spot to find many different citrus-related products and fresh fruits including Jabara citrus from Wakayama, Yuzu from Koichi, Kabosu from Oita, Shikuwasa from Okinawa and Sudachi, Yukou and Awa Suzuka from Tokushima. Awa Suzuka is apparently a hybrid between Sudachi and Yuzu. It was recently released and Tokushima is currently trying to promote the citrus. I found some more information here: https://4citrus.com/english/ . It was quite an impressive fruit.




Dekopons were promoted a lot! Very high quality and tasty fruit, but often priced at at least 6€ per fruit, often double of that. I did look like there were different varieties of dekopons, since the I saw different sizes and colorations of the fruit. But this could be an other class of dekopon.



I visited the Koichi prefecture to look for some Yuzu farms. I mostly saw Citrus being grown in plastic tunnels. In the mountain region of Kochi, Yuzu was instead mostly grown unprotected. It was pretty impressive to see the scale on which yuzu was grown. Almost all of the yuzu I found was the very seedy kind. In fancier restaurants, I was sometimes met with seedless yuzu and sudachi. Unfortunately I have not found any seedless varieties in Europe. In Japan, it was simply available on Amazon.

I am fairly sure Dekopon is seedless. I tried some fruits in Japan, but I never found seeds.

Does anyone happen to have a protocol for properly germinating citrus seeds? I have inconsistent results. Usually the main problem is getting fungus on the seeds after peeling the seed coats. I have previously tried sterilization with bleach and/or disinfection in 40°C but that was not able to get rid of the fungus completely (or the growing substrate was not clean). Any help would be appreciated!

Are you using LED? Perhaps you are giving too much light.

Hi, I am germinating some yuzu seedlings, and some of them appear to be variegated. Does anyone have experience with this trait? Does it persist in the seedlings?

Thank you for sharing. This gives me a good idea of what to expect. How tall would you say a seedling would be on average to reach maturity?