I like the Four Winds trees. They are very hardy! If I do end up getting a blood orange, that is where it will come from. I ordered my lemons over the internet and they came via UPS but this past spring I saw some for sale at a local nursery. Next year (I'm not buying any trees this late in the year) I will check there first before ordering over the internet and paying the huge shipping charge. "Your trees look absolutely amazing through it all." Thank you very much! :D I checked your link - yours are beautiful. I wish I could have that many, but space constrains me. I gave all mine (except the tangelo) a seaweed spray today, and as soon as my predator mites have had a chance to do their thing in the yard, I will start with the FE. How do I dilute the FE, by the way? "I can't beleive that your meyer is so resilient..That is encourageing for me anyway." It is ridiculously tough. When it had foot rot, I stopped watering it entirely and let it dry out for a MONTH. Then I gave it a good soak and then let it go another MONTH without water. Halfway through the second month, the sores started to dry up, so I think that's when the fungus deceased. I am still, however, to this day very careful about transferring anything from that plant to others. It's always the last one I check with the water meter, for instance, and then I wipe the meter down with alcohol before I put it away. The following winter it suffered spider mite attack. The winter after that it dropped almost all its leaves because it was, unbeknownst to me, in a draft during the day. I moved it as soon as I figured out the problem, but too late! Then this last winter was the Alternaria. Yet it lives. It has a strong survival instinct. It is my favorite tree, despite having never given me a single lemon. I think all the adversity it's faced is what has given it that nice tree-shape in such a small format. "I stuck it outside by March, and this is what it looks like now..;-)" That's the one you had labeled as being almost destroyed by thirp and scale? It is gorgeous! :D I think the Meyer lemons are made of titanium. By way of contrast, if I do even the slightest thing wrong with the tangelo (move from outside to inside too fast, or vice versa too fast, not enough humidity, too much humidity, not enough light, even the tiniest hint of a draft) it drops a ton of leaves. It is a big crybaby, but at least its temperamentality has taught me a lot about what citrus don't like. I have heard that blood oranges are very persnickity trees, but I think I'm ready to tackle one. "You are doing a great job with yours, and it is nice to meet you." Nice to meet you, too! "I like how you made wintering them sound easier than most think they are." It would be totally easy if not for the tangelo, which whines and cries and takes up a huge amount of space. We are going to screw some hooks into the ceiling next month, the kind you use for hanging plants, and suspend a shop light from them, and I think that will solve all my light problems for a good long time.

When the fruit doesn't fill out properly and falls off, it is usually one of two things happening. 1- the fruit isn't getting fully pollinated and therefor drops off. (not all varieties require pollination to develop fruit but most do.) If this is the problem, you could try picking a male flower (the ones without a little cucumber behind it) and pull the petals off and use it to pollinate the females. 2- If the blossom end is turning brown and soft before the fruit drops off, it could be Blossom end rot or (BER.) BER is a calcium deficiency in the growing fruit. It is quite common in tomatoes but also attacks other fruiting plants especially squash I've noticed. Anyway, it might not be a lack of calcium in the soil since any root stress can often stop the roots from being able to take up enough calcium. Or if the plant is just growing soo fast that the plant just can't get the calcium to the fruit fast enough to keep up. They make BER spray that you can foliar feed with to help the plant get the calcium where it needs it quicker. Some plants outgrow the BER problem if it is just from growing too fast and it is just the first few fruit that you loose. Once a fruit shows signs of BER, you can't save it all you can do is try to improve conditions for the plant to produce future healthy fruit. Good luck, looks like a nice plant. Is it just one plant...... There could be a 3rd option. If that is one of those types of plant that only produces female flowers (and isn't parthenogenic which means all female flowers capable of producing fruit without pollination) but requires cross pollination from another plant that has male flowers. In which case, you will need to find someone with another cucumber plant that can give you some male flowers to use on your girl flowers.

Don't be ridiculous -- I don't cut off all the foliage, just the long crazy vines that are running everywhere and producing small fruitlets a foot or more past the point of the fruit I want to ripen. IME the melons tend to set the fruit a few feet down the vine, there's plenty of foliage left, trust me. And 7 week of "summer" or summer-like weather isn't enough to sweetly ripen fruits that set past mid-summer, not even those personal-sized ones -- they end up pretty much tasteless, if they ripen at all. The days are shortening and the angle of the sun isn't as high -- the amount and strength of sunlight later in August and into September just isn't going to cut it up here, no matter how hot it might get. Hey, why not try it OP? If you've got multiple vines, cut some back and leave the rest and see what happens.

Yes, it can. But, that's a double edged sword. If the rose is once-flowering, the extra heat from that hot wall can cause it to flower for a shorter time than it might have if it was planted away from the wall. It's a balancing act between light, temperature and water. Too little of any of them will prevent the desired result...flowering. Too much of any of them will have the same effect. If the rose repeats, you can bring it on earlier and faster, but with a shorter flower life for each flush, by putting the plant in a hotter position. If it's once-flowering, you can start flowering earlier, and stop it earlier, by increasing the heat. The reason many once-flowering types flower so long and often appear to "repeat" in coastal climates is simply due to the heat and cool patterns. In Pacific Palisades, Banksiae flowered from February through August (when the heat started). O'Neal blueberries flowered and fruited nearly the same period of time. Many once-flowering roses kept blooming as long as it stayed "spring-like" weather. The same plants, grown inland where the temps were thirty to fifty degrees hotter, stopped flowering as soon as the heat hit. Right here in north Santa Barbara County where it's been COLD for months, with one or two short ventures in to "heat" (mid seventies) then drops back into the 60's, Banksiaes, Fortuniana, Basye's 86-3 (Laevigata X Banksiae), Xanthina, Primula, Hugonis, all once-flowering, have flowered, stopped, begun flowering again and continue flowering because the temperature changes have tricked them into "thinking" spring has come, gone and now returned. If I grew them against a southern wall where the solar heat kept the wall "hot", that flowering could easily stop for the same reason it stops where it's hotter. I'm sure you've noticed your once flowering types often flower longer than they do in hotter areas.