How to Care for Citrus

G'day, welcome to iCultivate. My name's Steve. I have this old citrus tree that is in a really sad state of repair. So today we're going to be looking at bringing it back to good health and into good production. This is my citrus tree. It's actually a Valencia Orange and it is in a really sad state of repair. You can see by the leaves that it is in fact suffering quite a few macro and micronutrient deficiencies. So that's something that we're going to have to address. Most immediately though you can see that there's lots of competition around the root base of this particular tree. Citrus are surface feeders, so therefore we need to ensure that we don't have other plants competing underneath the drop zone of the leaves. So the first task for today will be let's clear this area underneath this particular tree. Okay, so that's the first step complete. We now have got no weeds or grasses competing with the root zone of this particular citrus tree. The next step now is let's have a look at the leaves and see exactly what the problems are and how we can fix them. The first problem that really stands out on this particular tree is in the leaves. And if we have a closer look at this we can see a very clear green venation in the leaves surrounded by yellowing. This is a very clear indicator of an iron deficiency for this particular citrus tree. In addition to our nutrient deficiencies we've got a fair bit of dead wood on this tree as well. And so what I'm going to do is to take some time to not only improve the nutrient deficiencies, but in addition to that to remove this dead wood, open up the tree and allow better ventilation through this particular canopy. So let's start by removing all the dead wood in this particular tree. So now what I've done is removed all the dead wood, I've removed a lot of the spindly growth. And what this has done is it's opened up the tree further. Opening up the tree further allows better ventilation. It also helps to restrict the impact of such pests such as mites. And it also helps with fruiting. But now what we have to do is to deal with these mineral deficiencies. So I'm going to go now and get a range of different types of fertilizers that can help with this. Back in a moment. So I've got my fertilizer here, which is a combination of a whole range of different materials including chicken manure, but most importantly iron sulfate to help correct this iron deficiency. Before I apply this though, what I'm going to do is I'm going to drag back this mulch, apply the fertilizer and then push the mulch back in place. So let's do that. Don't forget to not get the mulch too close up to the base of the actual trunk because that can induce cholera, which is something of course we want to avoid. Now that we've completed this task, I would hope now that this tree will start to look a lot healthier over the coming months and even produce a much stronger crop than what it has done in the past. But now hopefully a few tips that will help to ensure that your citrus will provide a healthy, productive crop from year to year. Consider during spring watering your citrus with trace elements and then in spring and in summer make sure that you give it a supply of iron sulfate because remember citrus are very heavy feeders and so therefore we need to make sure that these trace nutrients are available to it. Consider also every season, so that's four times a year, giving it a feed of poultry manure and fortnightly some seaweed. But one little important hint, don't feed your citrus while it is flowering because if you do, you'll get a lot of wonderful green leaves, but you won't get many flowers and therefore not much fruit. But I hope this video has been useful. Consider please going to our website iCultivate.net and joining the community, but also please leave your comments on this particular video. Thanks for watching. iCultivate