FIVE (5) CITRUS CARE TIPS | Mulch, Water, WhiteWash, Fertilizer, Pruning & Harvest

Hi, my name is Charles Malki, biologist and plant expert with Ivory Organics, where we grow cool plants, and in this lesson I'm going to share with you five helpful tips to help you grow a ton of citrus, and specifically we're going to be discussing lemons, as every Mediterranean garden needs to have lemons. They're so versatile and so important in the everyday cuisine, from marinades to homemade dressings. In fact, it's been years since there's been salad dressing in our refrigerator, because we make our own salad dressings using the lemons from our garden, and of course it's always fun to add some flavor to your water as well. On average, our family consumes at least one to three lemons per day, and having all of these lemon trees in our citrus orchard has been truly invaluable to our family. One of my favorites I've got right here, we've got an avocado, and let me share with you one of the avocados we have here in the garden. Come and follow me. So over here is our Fuerte avocado tree, and come and check out how beautiful these fruit are. Well, let's continue. So if you've got avocados and lemons, and this is optional, some corn tortillas, you've got a meal. Check this out. We're simply going to take an avocado here, and I'm simply going to be cutting it all the way around the seed, like so. Once you've cut around the circumference of the avocado, you're simply going to twist the two parts apart, and removing the seed is quite simple as well. You simply stick your knife into the seed, and it comes loose like so. What we're now going to do is put in some slices into the avocado, and fill up your tortilla with this delicious fruit. We're now going to take one of our lemons here, and I want to share with you how different these lemons look. I've got within my property some sweet Meyer lemons. I've also got the traditional store-bought Eureka lemons, but also very comparable to the store-bought Eureka lemons is also the Portuguese Lisbon lemon, which I'll share with you in just a moment. But just take a look at these lemons. This one over here is a Eureka lemon, and check out how large that is. I'd say it's the size of a softball, much larger than a baseball. And over here, comparable in size, is the Meyer sweet lemon. So you can see Eureka lemon, Meyer lemon, and even though these are like insanely large, there are some smaller variations of the same fruit. Again, the sweeter Meyer lemon, you can see it's indicated by the more orange skin compared to the lighter, more yellow Eureka lemon over here to my right. So Eureka lemon, Meyer lemon, and again Eureka lemon, Meyer lemon, just so you can see the difference. Let's cut into both so you can see the differences as well. So we'll cut into it here like so. And again, sweet Meyer lemon, virtually seedless, but there are some seeds, and the Eureka lemon like so. And this smell is just overpowering, beautiful. The Eureka lemon, as well as the Meyer lemon, can have anywhere from zero to one to as many as six or seven seeds, depending on how much cross-pollinating is happening within the garden. We're now going to take our lemon juice. You can see over here is the avocado tortilla, and we're simply going to squeeze some flavor on top of the avocado fruit, and we're just going to top it off with just a sprinkle of salt. And this here could be my meal every single day. Absolutely delicious, and obviously we can flavor our water as well like so. Cheers. Well, let's get started. Five helpful tips. Let's get going. So gardening tip number one, mulch. Mulch is simply your wood chips. As you can see here, I pulled this out from another part of my garden, but you can see all of the white fungal hypha, which is interacting with this decomposing and breaking down wood chips, which adds invaluable resources. All the elements that went into creating all of this life is now going back into the soil to benefit this life, and specifically my Eureka lemon tree. What we're going to do is we're simply going to add wood chips. As I've already done around all of the fruit trees within my garden, a good two to three inch layer of wood chips, and more is not better. Adding too much wood chips to your garden, you end up smothering all of those air roots. By adding a good two to three inch layer of wood chips, what you end up doing is creating a blanket of warmth in the winter, and in the summer you're creating a much cooler soil environment, which helps all of the underlying beneficial life within your soil, from your beneficial earthworms, to your beneficial bacteria, to your beneficial mycorrhizae and fungus that are underlying the soil. So that's what adding a nice blanket of wood chips is going to do in your garden, in addition to also helping the soil retain moisture, and that's going to cut back on watering, and also a blanket of wood chips is going to cut back significantly on the number of weeds within your garden as well, cutting back on your weeding time. It's hugely important to make sure that those wood chips do not come into contact with the bark. All too often I see people adding wood chips all around their tree like this, and that's a grave mistake. When these wood chips, which are sponges with water, come in contact with the bark, which is also a sponge to water, it'll result in a phenomenon known as stem rot, and you want to make sure that the bark stays dry, and that you build up those wood chips a good two to three inches away from the tree like so. Citrus care tip number two is water, and when you water you may have a drip, or a sprinkler, or a soaker hose, or whatever your watering system is, but at the end of the day what you need to accomplish for your tree is to mimic rain, and the idea is you want to water that entire root zone of the plant, and not just one side of the plant. As you can see here with my watering system, I've got a type of sprinkler that's off to one side of the plant, but it's happening to the detriment of the other side of the plant. Sometimes I've noticed this pattern throughout gardens, not just in mine, but in a lot of other gardens, where only one side of the plant is getting watered, and it creates a disproportional plant, and it takes away overall from the health, and the quality, and the life of the plant. So what I typically do within my garden is I'll come around on watering days, and the goal when watering is to water thoroughly, make sure that you water deep, you want to make sure that you're basically watering it so you can go a longer period of time without watering. It's of greater value to the tree to make sure that those, that entire soil structure is wet, so those roots can grow deep, and that you allow the soil to then go dry, but never bone dry within watering. There should still be a little bit of moisture, but those top couple of inches, few inches of soil should otherwise be dry before that next round of watering. But what I'll do on a watering day, such as today, is I'll come also with my soaker hose, and I'll continue filling in those areas that are not getting enough water. I'm not just watering the plant, but I'm also watering the soil biology, which includes again the earthworms, and the beneficial bacteria, and the beneficial mycorrhizal fungus that live within the soil, and the goal is again not just to water a zone, but to water the areas. And so that's what we're going to do right now with our hose. So citrus care tip number three is whitewashing. You can do everything right from fertilizing, watering, and so forth, but the plant is burning. In the summer, we're dealing with exposed tree trunk bark, whether it be the branches or the tree trunk exposed to too much light, resulting in burn. In the summer, summer sunburn. In the winter, whitewashing offers the protection of insulation as well from the winter freezing cold temperatures as well. So you're simply rounding temperature extremes by whitewashing. And here's a product made by Ivor again, it's called the three-in-one plant guard protection against damaging sunburn. And again, that's summer sunburn, winter sun scald, and insects and rodents for use on your fruit and nut trees, ornamental trees, and shrubs. And we, and the way this product works is it has all of these oils from castor, cinnamon, clove, garlic, peppermint, rosemary, and spearmint. And what we're going to do now is simply brush on all of those exposed wood areas, because in the spring, we're going to be dealing with 13 hours of daylight. By summer, 14 hours of daylight. And if it doesn't have branches, which I'm going to demonstrate next to this, that are shading some of these overexposed areas of trunk, without whitewash protection, fruit trees, and in fact, roses and any ornamental trees can suffer first, second, and third degree burns. And without whitewash protection, these plants can burn. And we've demonstrated third degree burns on roses. When we visited the gardens, we demonstrated on an orange tree that we visited in North Hollywood a couple of years ago. And we've also demonstrated it on fig trees as well. And again, I found this pretty much across all plants, whether they be ornamental or fruit bearing. And so what we're going to do here is we're simply going to brush on the product like so. And it is the south side of the plant that will need the most protection from the sun in the northern hemisphere. And it's the reverse in the southern hemisphere, places such as Australia. And if you take a look over here, there's another point I want to share with you. If you take a look right there, there's a prune branch. And it's important to also protect it with the three-in-one plant guard to prevent diseases and pests from entering that wood and to begin hollowing out the underlying wood structure. And we'll continue applying the product like so. So it's most important to protect your youngest of fruit trees as well as even your more mature fruit trees if you're doing any type of pruning that's opening the canopy and allowing too much light in. Again, that can lead to first, second, and third degree burns. I always advise protecting what I call the heart of the tree, being the underlying tree trunk and those most important key branches. If you protect the heart of the structure in the event any of those outer branches burn or break due to wind or break due to overload of fruit or whatever may happen, as long as the heart is healthy, it can push out new branches and you'll continue having a long-lasting and fruitful, or if it's a flowering, flowering plant to last much longer than a plant that's infected with disease and burn and damage at the region of, again, the way I define it being the heart, the underlying tree trunk with those initial supporting branches. So that's exactly what we're going to do. We're going to be whitewashing all the way down to the ground level, working our way up. We're also protecting the graft area as well as that's exposed wood, so we're sealing the grafted wound. And again, we're protecting those initial first three tree branches. That'll be the three branches for the life of this particular variety of lemon, again being another Eureka lemon tree that's here in our garden. And while we're here, let me share with you the Lisbon lemon so you can see the difference. And I'm down to my last lemon of about a dozen that we're able to harvest off of this variety, but this here is the Lisbon lemon. Again, it's quite similar in flavor, and you can see over here this plant doesn't have a canopy as you would expect, as most trees would be. This tree is about two and a half years old, and the entire south side of the plant doesn't have any protection from sun extremes. And that's the reason when we had that summer record high of 117 degrees here in Los Angeles, we immediately rushed out and protected the entire side of the exposed tree trunk, protecting with the whitewash, right? But as we, within the next 30 to 60 days, that sun is going to be a lot higher and a lot more intense, and the plant will be protected until eventually this plant creates a canopy that naturally protects and shades the underlying tree trunks and branches. Let's continue. So our next gardening tip is on feeding, fertilizing your citrus. And before we do, let me just share with you how beautiful this row of my sweet Meyer lemons are. Starting with, again, you can see these young and mature fruit. And in general, just to let you know also as we're comparing the Meyer lemon to the Eureka lemon, they're both considered everbearing lemon trees. The Meyer lemon, in my experience of growing them for well over a decade, is that they push out most of their fruit in the winter, and the fruits don't last that long on the plant as long as the Eureka lemon. And the Eureka lemon is more so a year-round everbearing variety, offering fruits, I would say, a good eight to nine months out of the year, a good steady, readily supply, compared to the Meyer lemon, where I'm harvesting a good 90%, I'd say, within three months. As you can see, the lemons are going to go from this green to yellow, and as they become too ripe, they'll even become characteristic orange, as it's believed that the sweetness of these lemons were due to a cross in China between a lemon and a mandarin orange. So those are the flavors you're getting within the fruit. So let me now share with you the rest of these lemons, and just check out this canopy full of these beautiful clusters of lemons. And here's the next generation of flowers. And here we are now the first week of February. Another huge cluster of flowers right in here amongst these leaves. And you come in a little bit more, and this is now our third within the row of the Sweetmeyer lemons, and you can see just how many. There's probably a good 50 to 60 lemons just on this bush alone. What I want to share with you is now about feeding. When it comes to caring for your citrus plants, plants need more than just NPK. And Ivory Organics has developed a product called Six Macros, which gives your plants all of these six macronutrients that plants need. If you check out virtually any fertilizer product on the market right now, you'll notice that they only have NPK, and they're all focused about nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, but they've left out the other three very important macronutrients for plant health. And those include, if you take a look here, here's your NPK, and again this is all organic, nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, with levels 13, 12, and 13, as well as it has magnesium, sulfur, and calcium. There's a super blend as well as a premium blend with lower NPK, but still complete in having all of the six macronutrients. And this product can make up to 120 gallons by simply taking one tablespoon to a gallon of water, and you can use it as a as a liquid feed. You can also use it as a foliar nutritional spray on your plants. And let's go ahead and demonstrate that now. Come and follow me. So here we are now alongside our Oral Blanco variety of grapefruit. We can go and harvest one here. And you can see it's a beautiful size. It's believed to be one of the sweetest of the grapefruit varieties. It's a white grapefruit and quite delicious as well. And I'm now going to demonstrate how to feed your plant or otherwise fertilize your plant. You're going to take a tablespoon of the product, like so, to a gallon of water. This is a two gallon watering can, and we're simply going to stir the contents in like so. I've removed the end over here so it doesn't block with the spray in as we're simply going to use it to water around the tree like so. And I'm simply going to water the entire root zone. You could also use the product in its granular form. If you take a look over here, it reads over here, the macronutrients, nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, magnesium, sulfur, and calcium. It also has micronutrients, iron, manganese, zinc, copper, boron. It's got a ton of ingredients, which includes some of the beneficial mycorrhizae, beneficial bacteria. And the application use over here is over here for soil directions, how to basically apply it for vegetables as a foliar feed as well as for your compost tea. And with both of these, it's pretty much at a rate of one tablespoon per gallon of water. And as you can read over here, this four pound bag can make 120 gallons. The smaller 11.8 ounce bag makes 20 gallons. And we're simply going to take some of the product like so, and we can scatter it around the root zone like so. I'm just going to put one tablespoon here, and I'll put one tablespoon there. And once you start watering the plant, the product will begin to work. The other thing I want to share with you while we're down here low on these trees, these plants were installed about a year and a half to two years ago. If you take a look at the tree trunks, you can see that they're protected with the Ivor Organics 3-in-1 Plant Guard. We protected the heart of the plant again, protecting that tree trunk. You can see the grafted zone was all the way up to where my finger is. You can see that change in coloration between the wood, between that zone right there, and then the upper scion wood, which controls the flavor. I can demonstrate this one more time just below here. And again, root stock all the way up to this point. You can clearly see that line that goes around. And then this here is the scion wood, which controls the flavor. And again, we protect it all the way to where those underlying leaves are to protect the heart of the wood. Right now it's not sunny, but again, within the next 30 to 60 days, the sun is going to start gaining intensity. And we want to protect the heart of the tree until the plant creates a better canopy shading the underlying structure. However, what if you want to keep the plant in this tree form, exposing that entire tree trunk at all times? Whitewashing is ever more that important. And check out all of these blossoms up here. If you take a look here, you can see all of the flowers coming in. If you come in a little bit further over here, you can see another beautiful cluster of grapefruits coming through. And for those of you that don't know this, grapefruit are called and coined the name grapefruit because they're typically formed in these clusters that resemble that of grapes. So when it comes to feeding your citrus, you got to pace yourself. Every single season is not the same amount of fertilizer. For example, when you wake up in the morning, you start off with a light breakfast. For lunch, it's supposed to be the main meal of the day. For dinner, you taper off. And by winter, take a break. If anything, for your evergreen, such as your citrus and other tropicals, you can do a foliar nutritional spray to make sure that the plant continues to have all of the elements necessary to support all of the blossoms to maximize fruit yield. This over here is a dwarf variety of the Sweetmire lemons. And behind me here, you can see I've got a ton of lemons off of a standard Eureka lemon tree that's currently measuring about 12 to 15 feet tall, and will continue to grow had we not continued to prune it to keep its size manageable. Similarly, your plants should be fed differently depending on what the season is. In the spring, start off slow. Whatever the recommended dose is on your fertilizer label, cut back as you're warming up the amount of fertilizer the plant is getting. As the plant wakes up, as the amount of light it's getting every single day begins to increase. As it's approaching early summer, between May and June, you can now follow your fertilizer directions, giving it the maximum amount, as it's now supporting some young fruit. It's also now exposed to about 13 to 14 hours of light. And the metabolic processes within the plant are the most active. And then by early fall, maybe a low dose fertilizer one more time before it goes into hibernation. And then in the winter, again, take a break aside from maybe doing a foliar feed on your evergreen plants such as your citrus and other tropicals they may have within your garden. Let me share with you this Eureka Lemon Tree behind me. Check out all of these fruit. And again, we've got the younger fruit. And as I said, Eureka Lemon Tree is a more ever-bearing year-round variety. The skin also is more tolerant and able to last much longer on the tree than the Meyer Lemon variety, which is a thin-skinned lemon variety. So the Eureka Lemon, longer lasting on the tree, more ever-bearing. And check out all of these blossoms over here. And how cool is it that within about 10 to 12 months, these little blossoms will become this. No matter how much you feed it, the dwarf will always be small, the semi-dwarf medium, and then the standard varieties will go to a standard size. So harvest time is also pruning time. Most citrus ripen in the winter. And towards the end of winter, before the plant begins to maximize in blooms, is the best time to begin pruning your plants. So check out the height on some of these citrus. You can see that there's a general concept of keeping the plant manageable within this grow zone. But then there's this one straggler over here. We can simply bring it down like so. And we'll continue that pattern throughout. And notice when pruning, what I'm doing is I'm coming down. Once I have a general idea where I want to prune, I'm cutting down to about a quarter of an inch away from the node, allowing that next leaf and next leaf bud to continue the direction of the future branches. If I were to prune it like so, just randomly, I would end up with a stick of a branch with no guaranteed leaf buds. And the chances there's going to be some dieback, more likely than not. So what we're going to do again is I can follow it back down to the next leaf. But I figured the next place I'm going to want to prune it is going to be right here. And again, I leave a leaf. As you can see, with a leaf bud right adjacent to that thorn, even though you don't see it, chances are it's going to be pushing out some new growth right in that zone. One last pruning tip I want to share with you when it comes to citrus, a lot of research says no pruning necessary unless it's blocking a walkway or the branch is going and falling in the wrong direction. But I recommend pruning a minimum of 5% to 10% a year. The logic behind that is you want to have a top plant of the structure that is a little bit smaller than the base, which is your root system that's under the ground. By having a root system or a base that's stronger and a little bit larger, we're talking about a 5% to 10% difference that is larger, you're going to notice that your plant is going to perform that much better than if a plant were equal. And in the worst case scenario, the top structure is going to end up being top heavy relative to the base roots. And that will result in a plant that will be lacking in vigor, may be lacking in fruit yield and production, and lacking in so many other different ways, including disease and pest resistance as well. So try to form, and this applies to all your plants and trees, so strive to create a base structure that is larger. And again, by as little as 5% to 10% at a minimum, other plants require much more significant pruning. But citrus, a minimum of 5% to 10% a year to help keep the plant in checks so that the upper structure is, so to speak, lighter than the base structure, which is supposed to be a little bit larger. A lot more lemons to pick. So I hope you enjoyed this educational moment brought to you by Ivory Organics. And if so, be sure to give us a thumbs up. And most importantly, don't forget to hit that subscribe button. For those of you that have already subscribed, don't forget to hit that push bell notification. And as always, I just want to remind you to keep on growing with Ivory Organics. Wishing you all happy gardening. So by harvesting the fruit, the fruit are the children of the parent plants. These fruit are consuming and taking away a lot of the energy and the resources that are otherwise in the soil and within the plant. By harvesting them, the plant can now focus on the next generation. Check this out over here. With all of these new blossoms, we got some green lemons, some smaller lemons, and there's just these blossoms throughout the entire plant structure. Then now the tree can focus on, again, the next generation instead of having some of those resources going towards last year's harvest, which we're now reaping this week. So you can see some of the Meyer lemons are large. Some of them on the same tree are smaller. And again, because they're so thin-skinned, they don't last as long as the Eureka lemon. And we're simply going to squeeze them and then add the juice. We're simply going to go with our ice cube trays and fill it up, freeze them, and we can use these lemon cubes throughout the year. So we can now enjoy year-round Meyer lemons instead of just enjoying them for one season. So I hope you enjoyed this educational moment brought to you by Ivory Organics. And if so, be sure to give us a thumbs up. And most importantly, don't forget to hit that subscribe button. And as always, just want to remind you to keep on growing with Ivory Organics. Wishing you all happy gardening.