How To Grow PERFECT Citrus In Containers

I've grown so much citrus over the last five or six years that sometimes I have to give it away to family and friends. But there was a time when I struggled to grow a single plant. And if that sounds like you, then this is the video for you. It's the complete guide to growing citrus in containers. By the end of the video, you'll know what varieties to pick, how to avoid the potting mistake that almost everyone, including myself makes when they're growing citrus in pots and how to mix your own soil for optimal results. If you're thinking, Hey Kev, I live in a cold climate. I hate you for making this video. You're teasing me with your juicy, juicy citrus. I'm not because this video will include some tips on how to protect citrus in pots in cold climates. The beauty of citrus varieties for pots is that pretty much anything goes. You can grow lemons, limes, kumquats, camomance, yuzu, grapefruits, oranges. It doesn't really matter, but there is something that does. Now, if you look at my beautiful little citrus right here, this is a Lisbon lemon tree. It's actually a story of two different citrus. First off, you have the plant sort of above the soil. This is the Lisbon lemon variety, but down below right where you see this cut mark or what we call the graft point, there's something called a citrus rootstock. What growers will do is they'll take rootstock and graft on the actual citrus variety that you want to grow. Whether it's a Meyer lemon or an orange or a lime, it doesn't really matter. Now what the rootstock does is control some of the characteristics of how this plant is going to grow. And for us citrus container growers, the thing we really care about is the overall size of the tree. In that case, there are three different rootstocks that you can look out for. There's dwarf, semi-dwarf and standard. And you might be thinking, you know, dwarf, I'm not going to get that much fruit. It seems like it's going to be too small. Remember these are true trees we're talking about. A dwarf citrus is still six plus feet tall. It's just that a standard one can sometimes be double that height. And we're not even growing a six foot tall citrus in a container like this. So when it comes to citrus varieties, no matter which one you choose above the soil, you want to make sure you're getting either a dwarf or semi-dwarf rootstock. For a couple of quick variety recommendations. If you want a lemon, I like a Meyer or a Eureka. If you want an orange, it's hard to go wrong with some kind of Mandarin orange or even a Washington Navel. And then for limes, we've had the most success with the Bear's lime. It's bear with two S's. If you want to get a little freaky with it, Yuzu's great, loves cold climates. And for my Filipinos out there, try calamansi. Now let's talk pots, which is where so many people go wrong, including myself way back in the day when I first started growing citrus at my old homestead and brought those citrus to this property right here. Now, if you take a look at my beautiful lemon here, this is in a three and a half gallon pot and you might be tempted and excited to put it in a giant pot like this one down here. This is probably 20, maybe even 30 gallons. This is Jacques on our team's Mandarin. He's been pulling beautiful Mandarin off of this. You say, well, it's a container citrus so I'm going to put it in a huge pot because that's kind of its final home, right? And the truth is you can stunt the growth of your citrus by doing that because citrus is a plant that likes dry, well-draining soil. So much so that you actually have to mix your own or buy a pre-made citrus specific mix, which I'll get to later in the video. So if you put it in a big pot and kind of throw whatever soil in there, that soil could stay too wet, lock nutrients out or even potentially rot the roots. So you want to be very delicate here. This is a long-term journey. Pot it up to a pot, not that much bigger. In this case, three and a half gallon to seven gallon, which in diameter is only a boost of about one or two inches or so. And material also matters with really any plant, but especially something like citrus, which you're going to care for and reap so many harvests over the years. Container material really does matter. So if you take a look, this is your standard black plastic nursery pot. This is actually my top recommendation. Either black or a lighter plastic. Might not look aesthetic, but it keeps the water in and you can always do the pot and pop method where you put it in a nicer pot. Now you can put it in something like a terracotta pot. Obviously Jacques had a really good result with his mandarin here, but it will lose a little bit more water. So you might just have to manage that watering a little more closely and you can size that pot up just a touch more because of course you're compensating for potential water loss. If you're a renter or if you don't have a lot of space or budget, a grow bag actually is a great option for citrus. I've done it, a couple of different times. It works really well. These are our Epic grow bags. They are lined on the inside, which means they hold a little bit more water, which is great. I would probably size up a little more than if I was using a black plastic. It sounds like a lot of details, but these things really matter when you're setting a fruit tree up in the first year or two of its life. This video is brought to you by our friends at Fox Farm, the official soil partner here at Epic Gardening. And right now the one that's hitting hard for us is the raised bed mix. Why? Because we just built out the Epic Metal Raised Beds here in the front yard. We topped off the soil. You remember from back in the day, you got your logs in the bottom on these tall beds. You got some debris in there and you put that high quality stuff right up at the top. And for us, that would be the Fox Farm Raised Bed Mix. I think you can tell it's working pretty good right now here in the front yard. And then every time we do a harvest, of course you're removing a lot of material, like all this sweet potato leaves, the sweet potatoes down below. You want to hit it with some kind of fertilizer. If you don't know what to do, you can go with the all purpose fertilizer. If you do know what to do, they have all sorts of custom mixes for specific plants, citrus and avocado, tomato and vegetable. Better yet, they're in a ton of stores around the country. So if you walk into a nursery and you don't see it, ask them where the Fox Farm is. We love it here at Epic Gardening. You can check a link out in the description to find out more. And now back to the video. All right, my friends, we're talking soil now. This is the part that you can go wrong in. Cause you might go to the garden center and grab garden soil, raised bed mix, potting mix, throw it in the pot, call it a day. You'll be crying all the way home and for years to come, because you're not going to get much citrus out of a mix like that. You need to mix your own custom. Fortunately you can do it with two ingredients at the garden center. One of them is going to be a citrus and palm mix like this. What this has in it, fir bark, lava rock, sand, pumice, aged redwood and peat moss. And then you need even more bark. So you can use pine, you can use fir. In this case, this is Western fir bark. It likes a lot of drainage, like I mentioned. So what you're going to do is you're going to crack open your fir bark. You're going to do one scoop in, two scoops in. Now you're done with your fir bark. Bust open your citrus and palm mix. You know a plant's needing custom soil when it literally has a bag that's commonly sold at a garden center. And you're going to do one part of this mix. So you can tell this mix is a lot more fine grained and yeah, there are some bark chunks in there, but nowhere near as much as pure bark obviously. So this is going to be a nice little texture boost. Dump that in. At the same time, I personally, there's not a lot of nutrition in that mix. Notice there's no compost in there, right? I like to put in some citrus slash avocado fertilizer. This one's from Fox Farm. We love them. It's our official soil and fertilizer partner here at Epic. The thing that you got to know about citrus is it wants nitrogen early. You're setting up a lot of that vegetative growth, the branching structure, et cetera. That's why this one is a 7-3-3, nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium. So because it's an organic granular fertilizer, you can be pretty liberal with it. It's not going to run out as much as maybe like a synthetic liquid would. I'm just going to dump, I don't know, about a cup or two in here and not stress about the amount all that much. Remember anything grown in a container needs more water and more nutrients because there's just not that much soil in here. So it's okay to give it a nice little dose of fertility. We'll give this a really nice mix. And now let's get to the repot. Got my seven gallon here. I'll put this little bad boy on the ground. I'll tell you what it's all about later. What you want to do is gently kind of smack the side of your pot. This is the easiest way to get it out I find, especially if it's a little bit stuck. Should be fine though. I kind of cradle the roots. I'll hold it over the wheelbarrow. Quick flip. And there we go. And look at this. Before you do anything, you want to look at the plant roots and look at the whole structure here and make sure you don't see a ton of circling, spiraling roots. Usually with citrus you don't. I don't know what it is. They just tend to be a little bit more healthy looking straight out of the nursery. Oh, don't worry. That's completely fine. You can lose a little bit of root mass. And actually I didn't lose any. It's just a little chunk of soil. So what I'm going to do, put this over here right now. I'm going to fill the bottom up just a touch. Don't put something like gravel down here, guys. I made a whole video on that like eight years ago. Really bad idea. You don't need that for extra drainage. It actually just effectively makes your pot smaller. So you don't want to do that. All I'm looking to do here is get it roughly to the height of the pot. Okay. That's looking pretty good there. Now when you're potting it up, there's not that much to keep in mind. The one thing you want to keep in mind, which you shouldn't ever run into because you really should be potting it at the pot surface from the transplanted pot, is the graft point. Like I mentioned, you want to make sure this graft point is not anywhere near buried at all. So we're going to compact this just a touch for good measure. I'm just going to sprinkle a little bit more right around this root zone here, making sure I kind of spread it around. And then we're going to backfill. After you pot in like this, especially when you're taking a smaller plant into a bigger, a couple taps here really helps to level it out. And then you can push that stake down a little bit too, to kind of make sure it's nice and secure there going straight up. If it sinks a bit, just toss a little bit more medium in. And we've potted it up successfully at this point, of course, give it a nice healthy water. If your hose has been out in the sun, run it a second. You don't want to burn those roots off. So give it a nice little soak. I like because it's so well draining. I don't like to blast the water in there. I kind of want to just do a light shower and have some patience. Just enjoy the fact that I'm about to have citrus in like a year. Still takes time. But the beauty is this pot up, which was pretty modest, will last you at least a year, at least, if not longer. It really depends on your climate, how well you're growing the citrus. But what you can do is when you do another pot up, if it's been over a year, sometimes it's good to do a nice soil refresh and just put a lot more fertility in there. Because again, it's a fruit tree that's growing in a little pot. You're going to want to water it a good amount. I would say if it's dry to two inches, get water on it ASAP. Even better if you can put a little irrigation ring on it, that would be a killer move that would save you a lot of time. You could also sprinkle organic granular fertilizer, or you could do a light dilute liquid fert a little bit more often, maybe like once every couple of weeks, once a month, a little bit heavier, especially when this tree is setting up. Now when citrus grows, whether it's in a pot or in the ground, the real structure you're going for is kind of counter to a lot of the fruit trees that you would grow, like peaches or plums or nectarines. Those ones want this kind of vase structure kind of coming out like this. They want a lot of light getting into that canopy, nice open structure we call it. Citrus tends to produce a lot of its fruit on that bottom third or so, and it will eventually kind of shrub and bush up. That's really the look you're going for. So the first year you're growing this, you're looking for some branching. You're looking for a little bit of vertical height. If you see that height just rock it up and not a lot stuff coming out of here, maybe do a little bit of summer pruning, take a snip off and hopefully you get a little bit more branching here. If you see anything coming out of the bottom right here, underneath that graft point, snip that off. We know that anything below the graft is the rootstock. So anything growing from that point or below is going to be rootstock tissue, which means you want to snip it off. It's not going to do anything for you. Now, I mentioned this weird little thing. This is definitely a fancy version of it, but this, for those of you in colder climates or who just don't have as much space, you're kind of chasing sunlight, whatever, these types of things are really good. This is actually a spinner for the green stalks that we sell on our store. So you can definitely just grab one of those if you want to, but you could put this on a dolly or even if you have a hand truck, you can cart this around. I used to do that back in the day. What you want is something that can move because citrus just doesn't like to be cold. There are a couple of varieties that do okay. Yuzu and a few others. We made a whole video on it you can check out. But this tip saves a lot of people. In fact, back in the day, like I'm talking hundreds of years ago, people would have orangeries, probably royalty, orangery I believe is how you pronounce it. And they would roll citrus in and out of these heated greenhouses or heated areas because in Europe it was cold and they couldn't really pull citrus off unless they did that. So that tip really unlocks citrus for way more climates than just sunny San Diego. So where are you going to put this though when it's actually growing in the season? Anywhere with six to eight plus hours of sun per day. The other thing you want to keep an eye out for is something called a citrus leafminer. You'll see these little light kind of swirls in the leaves. Typically on the younger leaves, a lot of people freak out when they see that. The truth is, unless it's a really bad infestation, most citrus plants can weather that pest. And as they get bigger and these leaves get a lot tougher, leafminers aren't really able to get into these big leaves. So I had it all down my orchard row the first year I put them in. Jacques, myself, we were both kind of worried. We were looking out for it. We just waited. We pruned off maybe some of the worst offenders. And years later, leafminers are not a problem at all. Besides that, there's not a whole lot of pests and diseases that you have to watch out for in a big way. There is something called the Asian citrus psyllid, which produces Huanglongbing disease, also known as citrus greening, that's caused a lot of devastation in the citrus industry in Florida and sometimes now here in California. But if you're sourcing citrus, you should make sure that it's coming from a reputable vendor. Which brings me to us as a reputable vendor. A lot of people don't know this probably because I don't really mention it that much. But here at Epic Gardening, you can actually buy not only citrus, but hundreds of other live plants delivered directly to your door from us. We have over a dozen citrus varieties. In fact, some of the ones in our very own garden, we ordered from ourselves. It comes right to your door. Everyone who's bought them has had a fantastic time growing them. So many different varieties. So if you want that, you can check the link out in the description. I really think if you've been hesitant to grow citrus, this video should get you started. And I don't think you should be as intimidated as I see a lot of people in the comments or asking me questions when I'm out and about. Give it a try. You will thank yourself. If you want a triple threat, you do a lime, a lemon, and an orange. Good luck in the garden and keep on growing.