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Magic cambium

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psa:
Rats invaded my greenhouses (for the first time ever) last year and devastated my collections.  Once they had eaten all the fruit, and then all of the tender plants, and all of the rare and special plants, they went after the bark on all of my citrus.  Come spring, I thought most of them were dead.  Until most of them leafed out again.  Some had cambium bridges that regenerated and grew.  But some were a complete mystery.



How is a completely girdled branch producing new sprouts?  Unbelievably, some of these fully-girdled trees leafed out completely, bloomed, and have fruit on them.  Today, when doing some pruning, I cut off a portion of this wood for the first time.  This branch wasn't productive and I decided to cut it off, back into the barkless portion.



On the cut end, I finally solved the mystery.  Last year's cambium appears to have regenerated under the bared wood. 



Amazing.  I guess the old layer had not completely died when they stripped the new stuff off the outside, and it came back when needed.  I've never heard of anything like this, but further digging shows a clear cambium layer under the dead white wood.  It seems to bridge back to the outer cambium in all the cracks in the section above it.  Crazy stuff.

I'm a little nervous going into another winter.  I hope the bark is able to regenerate.  As you can see from the rings on the cut portion, many of these trees are ten years old and I'd hate to lose them after having regained hope for their survival.

BP:
Dang I'm sorry that's really tough. I hope they make it! What kind of citrus do you have going in there?

psa:
Thanks.  The picture is of Gold Nugget.  These are the older trees that survived in that greenhouse, from my records:
Sudachi - Ichang Papeda
Meiwa
Pixie
Oroblanco
Australian Finger lime
Smith
Chandler
Owari Satsuma
Cocktail
Gold Nugget
W. Murcott
Honey Crisp

botanical pilot:
I've had to wrap some of my trees with old t-shirts to stop the squirrels down here from munching on the bark. They seem particularly fond of my loquats. Somehow the rats have left things alone, though I suspect they are a little more tenacious than squirrels.

psa:
I'm pulling out all the stops to go to war with the rats--traps, poison, deterrent sprays and paints, whatever it takes.  They dug up and ate the rhizomes as well as the plants themselves--everything from poinsettias to passion flowers.  They chewed through hardware cloth (metal wire) and plastic to get to some of them.  I'm still trying to figure out what to wrap the tree trunks with.  Many of them are grafted low and they gnawed on the branches, so it's not just a matter of a tube wrap.

Sometimes I paint the trunks to protect them from scald, and I thought I might do that and mix capsaicin and mint oil in.  Then wrap with burlap and use one of the many deterrent sprays on that.  I don't know what if any of it will work, though.  I think they're pretty desperate with hunger by the time they go to work on the bark.  So I'm hoping the traps and bait will get them.

I would really like to stop them before that point.  They were willing to eat the fruit before it was ripe, and I got none of it last year.  And there are more plants that really need to be in the greenhouse, but I don't want eaten.

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