The Tropical Fruit Forum

I'm guessing one factor is sour or semi sour are more hardy than sweet. So the stuff that survived on its own tend to be lower quality.

Some of these wild oranges I saw may be hybrids. Some of them are oranges others look and taste similar to ugly fruit but less sweet. Like edible grapefruit sweet but not that great. I think that's how most hybrids come out all weird like ugly fruit but I do love ugly fruit.

If you don't know what that is it's a natural hybrid they found growing wild but tastes much like a tangerine on the inside but ugly and disfigured looking.

I did a quick Google search. Found this. Someone who actually grew an orange from seed describing exactly what I describe and the person who learned about orange trees in college or by reading books replying that they normally are true to seed. Having tasted some 30 different orange trees grown from seed not once we're they the same. If you plant 50 of them you might get 5 or so as sweet as the parent if it's one of the highly sweet popular varieties. If it's already a wild orange almost all will be like the parent.
https://www.chron.com/life/gardening/article/Will-orange-trees-grown-from-seed-bear-sweet-1549534.php

A lot of times you can get them free from the store. Winn Dixie used to chop their own pineapples then throw a box of tops in the garbage. Which you could get and plant them all. Have to ask around. I don't know if they still do it. May be restaurants or other places too. They aren't good for growing for food. They produce fruit randomly not very often and I could never tell when it was ripe. Either pick it too young or it roots on the vine. But they are easy to grow in Florida and easy to get tops

Strange. I have seen a lot of different ones in Florida none of them producing good oranges. Edible maybe but not good like the original. But here Valencia doesn't survive. Too cold sensitive. It's mainly navels, Hamlin's, tangelos. Or was. They are dead now from greening. Spit the seeds out they grow on their own. Fruit ranges from totally sour like a lemon to slightly sour like a sweet grapefruit. None of them like the parent but then those wild ones usually their seeds are true to type

Swingle is a hybrid if I remember correctly. 3/4 tangerine 1/4 grapefruit. One would expect different shuffling of genes in the offspring. Interesting they are even similar in taste. Grapefruits are generally the hardiest citrus that are good to eat so tangors are top choices to grow combining cold hardiness, disease resistance with good fruit.

You get one of these "tropical" bulbs. It is as close to sunlight as it gets. When I'm up north in the winter I want to bask under this bulb. Then combine it with just a regular full spectrum white flourescent from walmart or wherever to give it a more full spectrum range of light. Seemed to be the best on my plants. Though I never tried LED or other types of light.

Don't get the "desert" bulbs for reptiles. It is mostly UV light and will glow purple. If it looks bright almost blinding white to your eyeball its pretty good light for the plant. Same with the lightbulbs at the store. If it looks red, orange, dim white, not too good, should be really bright full white. You can use orange bulbs and stuff to induce flowering or whatever other purposes but I never tried any of that. My Tropical bulb was maybe more orange than the full spectrum home bulb but it's so bright I can barely look at it, looks like sunlight to me. But they seem to do better with a combination of both rather than one or the other.

https://www.amazon.com/Exo-Terra-Repti-Glo-Fluorescent-Terrarium/dp/B01CEXCIIW/ref=sr_1_43?crid=YFNS0XAAN9TX&keywords=sun+glo+bulb&qid=1659626935&sprefix=sun+glo+bulb%2Caps%2C104&sr=8-43

That is one tiny bonsai tree. It's fungus/mildew whatever you want to call it. In Florida they have leaves like that all the time, pretty harmless. You can spray it with neem oil which works pretty well if it sits out in the rain or gets sprayed with a hose. The oil will stay on the leaves for a while and eventually wash off with enough waterings. But if you never water the leaves with a strong jet or rain, then I would stick with copper.

When I sprayed my lemon with neem oil it didn't damage it and it killed some insects I was having problems with and kills fungus. I don't know how citrus reacts to copper. On my grapes the neem oil does more damage to the leaves than copper, but usually pretty safe.

Ok. This is what I was saying. "Sour orange" is just a regular orange grown from seed. In the wild oranges are barely edible- either full of seeds, or sour like a lemon (though you can make orange aide like lemonaid out of them). There just a few selections that are very sweet, which they clone by grafting or by rooting the sticks.

When they use "sour orange" root stock it's just an orange tree grown from seed. Who knows what the parent was. Could be they just grew some navel oranges from seed.

Citrus is usually grafted because even though you can root a cutting, it doesn't grow a tap root. It's going to be a small bush with shallow roots in the top soil. It will be much weaker than a normal tree- less cold resistant, less resistant to drought or disease, it won't live as long though it could survive a really long time like 50 years or something. They are cool if you want a small tree and are willing to water it and take care of it because it won't survive drought or low nurtients, weeds or anything else very well. They are good for container plants.

Even if you graft, let's say a navel orange, onto a navel orange you grew from seed, it's a lot healthier. It will have a deep tap root, have better cold tolerance, better disease resistance. A lot of times they use a dwarf root stock which will grow bigger than a rooted cutting, but smaller than normal, because you don't want a tree too tall to reach the fruit. Or trifoliate orange is extremely cold hardy and disease resistant etc. will transfer some of that to the top of the tree.

If you grow a citrus straight from seed you get a different result yet. You actually get a big shade tree. The fruit will be so high up you won't be able to reach it. The tree is extremely healthy, much more resistant to disease, cold or drought than anything grown from a cutting. But oranges are not true to seed and revert to a wild type, usually various degrees of sour. Though it's possible to get a small percentage that are sweet.

Grapefruit is the best from seed. They come pretty true to seed and taste slightly better because the tree is just bigger and healthier, but the tree is so huge. The other thing, from seed it takes 7 years minimal to bear fruit. Even when the tree is huge it won't bear fruit. If you grow from a cutting they bear fruit immediately. You'll also get larger thorns or other undesirable traits on stuff grown from seed because the main cloned varieties are selected for desirable traits.

You found a "sour orange" root stock that might actually be slightly sweet because the parent was probably a sweet orange.

If you are grafting citrus, it doesn't make much sense to graft onto a rooted cutting, unless you are growing them in containers. The only way to get a strong root system is to grow citrus from seed.

Looks like every tree in Florida on some photos others look good. A good chance of greening. Trees grown from seed are not really affected by greening not much. But they revert to a wild state larger tree more thorns sour fruit. And some grafted varieties hold on for a really long time with greening. Others are goners.

Yep 100% humidity and sun so powerful it will burn your skin in 15 minutes if you are pale and citrus like it. But citrus don't like sitting in wet soil. It's good to add some sand to the potting soil. They can dry out quite a bit between watering with no problem but damp wet swamp soil they don't like. Don't like mulch. Here in Florida yes high humidity and rains a lot but the dirt is sand so roots dry out between watering and also hot so it dries quickly. A seedling needs zero fertilizer. They will sprout in pure sand. You can fertilize heavy once the plant is big.

This website has them. Vanessa is a good lubrusca hybrid seedless. Venus and Saturn from Arkansas. These would not be suited for the American South-East but might do well in Arizona. Just have to get a few different ones and see which ones do well for you. But a pure vinifera (European) grape almost definitely won't handle the heat or any disease. 

https://plantingjustice.org/shop/fruiting-vines/grape-table/vanessa/

You are in Arizona? You have way more options. The main issue here besides pierce disease the high humidity invites all kinds of fungus and rot unless the plant has natural immunity. The only seedless grape I know of for the south is Orlando seedless. It grows really fast small seedless berries. Pierce tolerant but mine got covered in fungus which isn't an issue in Arizona. Don't know if you will be able to find it anywhere. The ones I have and 99% of the varieties out there are seeded.

Most of the breeding is also focused on wine but these are good fresh eating as well.

The cheap cat litter is pure clay. Expensive cat litter has chemicals added so don't mess with that. The clay holds water and nutrients better but too much is bad the roots will be too wet. A small amount in the mix works really well though. For a long time all my grapes were dying. Now I am finally having success.