Last summer I was out picking up my CSA at the farm, and on the way back stopped to get some rooted plant cuttings someone had put out in their yard with a free sign. There were a few things, but the most exciting, and the one that thrived, was a 8" cutting from a very old kumquat that was rooted into a 2" pot. I brought it home and repotted it onto my front porch, then brought it in for the winter where it’s continued to keep growing rapidly, with the occasional boost from some of my organic grow nutes. This summer I might move it up into a 3-5g cloth pot, hoping to get a few fruits at the end of the summer if I’m lucky! We’re in an agricultural valley that gets great sun so I have high hopes for this one as long as I keep bringing it in over winter.
Are you certain that is a citrus tree? I don’t see the signs!
You know, I haven’t looked it up, just went by the label it came with. I guess I’m going to have to look now.
@JoeCrowe @PhilCuisine according to PlantNet, it’s a loquat:
Looking at the fruit, I can see how someone might get them or their names confused. I would have preferred kumquats, but this is still pretty neat.
You ever find bugs come in on your plant when you bring it inside?
Not yet, but it gets blasted with a mister on the porch pretty frequently, and when my outdoor plants come inside I give them a heavy spray down and soil drench with PureCrop1 just to be safe.
my persian lime is doing some hardcore leaf-drop 
You ever fertilize that thing? Mine used to make huge piles of leaves before I started giving it veg dose. Now they build up slowly. I’ve only lost a dozen leaves this winter.
I did. It got over watered by accident as my meter showed “dry” but it turns out the meter was accidentally set to light levels 
So it was fine but got a FULL WATERING. I’m hoping for the best 
oo yah tell me how it does. They are dessert plants as far as I can tell. They do pretty good with barely any water. My friend killed a bunch of them off I was wondering if it was overwatering or something like frozen roots, because the roots got all pulpy and rotted.
This is super rad, you guys have me wanting to look into this.
Hey @Dirt_Wizard how do you like that PureCrop1? I’d never heard of it before, I’m on thier website reading though and it sounds pretty cool, along the lines of a dr. Zymes enzyme based general IPM spray
I like it a lot, the science of it is a little beyond me, but micellar nanotechnology is plenty real, so I can believe it. It came recommended by my grow shop guy, apparently it’s one of the few things allowed by MA in commercial grows, and is quite popular in big grow facilities since it has a zero rating for toxicity in application so no PPE needed. I like that, and it seems to work well, I’m on my fourth grow without any mold or bugs beyond soil/fungus gnats, which it seemed to knock down just fine with an aggressive spot treatment. Since it’s supposed to be a preventative and biostimulant, I use it through early flower weekly. It smells nice, like vanilla soap but in a very faint way. They definitely have an impressive amount of studies posted and being updated for various crops compared to when I looked a year or two ago!
That’s awesome, I may have to get a bottle to check out, I’ve been looking for something similar to Dr. Zymes to rotate into my IPM program, just to keep potential interlopers guessing, was looking at plant therapy but maybe I’ll give this one a shot instead, thanks for the recommendation bud!
Hey I have questions about IPM. I mean, I don’t do anything like that on my house plants or on my weeeeed plants indoors.
Does it actually DO something?
ok so here’s an example of an IPM that does something. I’m growing fruit trees and vegetables outside and in the greenhouse. It’s pretty much a guarantee that bugs like aphids, thrips, whatever ear wigs caterpillars and so on will be hard at work munching on my plants. So I have a specific time I go out there to break their reproductive cycle by spraying the fruit trees for aphids and caterpillars. If I get them at the right time, they are fuuuuuuucked. Alright, so I grow the sweet basil, and lots of it. Genovese as well. The godamned earwigs love basil, and sweet peppers. They will definitely set up home in 25% of the peppers and eat every last sweet basil leaf. So on a 2 week schedule, I spray them for earwigs, using BTK.
Here’s what I’m not going to do, is spray something on a plant when I haven’t determined there is actually a reason to do it. I’m not out there randomly spraying plants for fungus, but if I see it, I’ll go ballistic and wipe it out. Are you just randomly spraying shit on plants when there might not even be a parasite on it?
I typically spray my plants once a week with either a very light dose of Dr. Zymes, or Dr. Bronners Soap mixed with water on a rotating basis as a preventative measure against bugs and PM etc. but if i notice an actual infestation ill up the ratio of the solution i use, or use a different product as the situation dictates.
Edit: this is all in veg of course, i stop this about 2 weeks into flower, Dr. Zymes advertises that you can spray up to the day of harvest, but i only bring that back out if i notice an issue, even then ill try to leave the plant at least 2 weeks before harvest with nothing sprayed, and ill likely wash the buds even still.
Nice! Glad I found this thread. I too am Canadian, been growing citrus for years, but did a big move a few years ago and had to gift them all away, had a few people text me pics of their ‘harvests’ lol. I am back at it and have several unknown 2 year old seedlings. Some oranges some lemon, my prize is a single plant I got from a ‘seedless’ mandarine, the only seed in the box of oranges, can’t wait to see what it offers, its only about 4 inches tall still. EDIT: this post gives me some great hope for real fruit, I love everything about these plants, their leafs and smell make em super specail.
I think you can grind up the leaves to use as a spice as well. Perhaps it was a curry? If it’s a mandarin it should reach maturity in another 3 years! Then you can force bloom it heh heh.
ok, just some food for thought right. But what if I told you this rock keeps tigers away, because you can’t see any tigers around. It just seems like a waste of money like when Homer buys the rock to scare away the tigers.
I get your point, for me it’s more of a fail safe, or a redundancy for my likely sub par discipline in the garden. I don’t shower or change clothes when coming into the house from outside and checking out the garden like you’re supposed to, I don’t have the time to scope every plant too to bottom on as regular of a basis as I should, stuff like that. so the weekly spraying in my mind helps to mitigate some of my failings because of a lack of time/discipline. Just my approach to it, always evolving for sure. But this gives me a little peace of mind right now, even if it might just be a tiger rock 