Fire duck~ A few of my trees still look horrible. We did not get enough chill hours here this year....somewhere around 83 for me. Not a good fruit year. Eva's pride is the ONLY tree that set normally..

My tree is the same. I cut four inches off the top, and below the bark, it was still green and alive. I was hoping to grow the European plums in pots for a while, moving the pots around to find the right micro climate in my yard. The north side of my house stays much cooler during the winter, and would be a good place to over-winter pots. A cherry tree fruits there. My five pluot trees and six Japanese plums are doing great in the ground on the south side of the house. IÂve read about how wonderful the greengage plums were; I had to try to grow a variety of greengage culivars and see if any will produce here, with a little fuss. They are supposed to stay small, so might do okay with pot culture. Raintree sends you such large, healthy trees, if they don't make it, it can't be done. The Bavay's was from a local nursery. None of Raintree's gages are on Citation rootstock, and are advertised as being good climate zones 5-9. Could the problem be with the rootstock, and not the chill factor? The greengage whip Greenmantle Nursery sent me on myrobalan has doubled in size, has large roots escaping from it's five gallon pot, and is ready to settle into its location, whether I want it there or not. I wish I were better with grafting, and could try some grafts on different root stocks. All my apple grafts lived. All my plum grafts died.

It is pretty easy. You only use is for certain types of trees that tend to get very hard, unyielding buds while in cold storage. Some of the varieties you use it for are oaks, redbuds, hackberries, weeping willows, birch, hawthorne, some types of dogwoods, barberries, and ornamental pears. When these trees are held in cold storage they sort of get "stuck" in dormancy and don't want to wake up. Often, if you plant these types of bare-root trees without sweating them, they stay in dormancy for months and, if they don't break dormancy at the right time after spring planting, they can die before the following spring rolls around. What you want to do by "sweating" them is to create a super-humid, moist environment that gives the buds extra "encouragement" to swell and break. You can sweat them in several ways. For example, if the trees came in a large cardboard box, you can take them out of it, line it with heavy plastic, and then put the trees back into it. If they have any packing material around their roots, remove any plastic and wet down that packing material throughoughly. Then use duct tape to seal up the large sheet of plastic and make it as air-tight as possible. Store the whole thing in moderate temperatures between 45 and 75 degrees Fahrenheit out of direct sun. Within a few hours, you should see condensation inside the plastic and that is what you want. It can take 1 to 2 weeks of sweating for the buds to swell and break. If your condensation gradually disappears, you may have to briefly open the plastic and wet down the packing material around the roots and then reseal it. Check the buds for signs of swelling every couple of days. Or, if you have a polyhouse or tightly constructed hoophouse or high tunnel that holds in the humidity well, you can wet down the roots and sweat them in that structure following the same principle of shielding them from direct sunlight and maintaining the right temperatures and high humidity. Or, you can lay the plants down on a garage or barn floor, remove any plastic from the trees root area and wet down the packing material around the roots, and cover up the whole thing with a sheet of heavy duty plastic or a tarp. It is a little harder to maintain humidity under the tarp though unless you lay it underneath the plants on the floor and sort of wrap it around the plants and seal it shut with duct tape.. Once you have swelling buds, the sweating has achieved its goal of breaking dormancy. The key to success with sweating is what you do after the sweating because the plants need to go into the ground when the weather is warm and humid--very similar conditions to their sweating period only the humidity is natural and not artificially mainatained under plastic. If you plant the trees and a late cold snap occurs, you can loose the dormancy-breaking effect unleashed by the sweating. So, you don't want to sweat trees until the weather is conducive to planting. And, as soon as the buds swell and you remove the plants from their sweating "area", you want to plant them ASAP. That's all you have to do to "sweat" a dormant tree.

Madeline, I have a Bearss lemon that has been planted 7 years ago when it was 3-4 ft tall. Two years after planting, it bore 1-2 fruit. When the tree grew to be taller and more bushy, it started to produce a crop of between 50-70 fruit. I didn't count exactly, but it was a lot and that was for the last three consecutive years. So, I'm guessing your lemon tree might need a year or so before it finally kicks off to a full fruit production? By the way what is the variety of your lemon? As for lime trees, I also have one in the ground and it's a Tahitian persian lime which I planted in 2008 when it was a little over 4 ft tall. For the past years, it bloomed scantily and produced very few fruit. This year, it must have been about 8-9 ft and it has about a dozen fruit. It's also a slow grower compared to my lemon. As to your question about your patio around your citrus trees, I've heard they like some space around for their roots to breathe. Some years ago, I built some patio blocks around my navel orange and the fruit production dropped the following year. The other concerns I have with citrus fruit trees right now in general is the citrus greening disease that is attacking a lot of citrus trees in FL. So far, I've seen a decline in all my citrus trees fruit production ... especially the oranges. I've read somewhere that certain lemons and limes are more resistant to the disease, but I don't know which kind. I don't know if this helps as that is all I know from my own planting experience.