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Citrandarin fruits just starting to change color

Dave in NoVA • N. Virginia • zone 7A

3 years ago

I know it's pretty subtle, but the dark green colored fruit is changing to yellow green. Eventually, if hard freezes hold off, to orange. This is Citrandarin (US-852), a fairly hardy Mandarin x Poncirus hybrid growing in the ground in Northern Virginia. Not fully hardy here, so who knows how long it will last. But it does grow vigorously.

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Comments (4)

bklyn citrus (zone 7B)
3 years ago
Nice
Ken "Fruity Paws" (N-Va 7a)
3 years ago
How much turpentine flavor from its Poncirus lineage? Curious how much sugar is needed to make a drink palatable?
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trying to grow pure Changsha in zone 7a would be a stretch, most likely it's not going to work out, but you may have a chance in zone 7b (especially the warmer half of zone 7b) if you live in the South. I have tasted the fruit of what I believe was a Morton citrange. The fruit entirely looked like a delicious orange, very inviting, but biting into it it had an awful flavor that I can only describe as putrid, and it made me want to immediately spit it out. I was told there was one other person who tasted it that found it to taste acceptably edible and could eat it. From what I have researched, I think many other Poncirus hybrids don't taste as bad as this Morton citrange, though they usually do tend to have a similar flavor. As for the US 852 hybrid, I have seen a video where a guy said he was even able to manage to enjoy eating them. Though I suspect he probably had more "adventurous" tastes that many people.
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Dave in NoVA • N. Virginia • zone 7A
Original Author
3 years ago
last modified: 3 years ago
Ken, it has off flavors. You'd need to use a fair amount of sugar...or two to three bags of Stevia (or your personal sugar substitute of choice). There is a slight trifoliate oil taste which prevents me from partaking very often, so really, I grow it more for the novelty than anything else. And sometimes, as a rootstock.

It is a big improvement over completely unpalatable P. trifoliata however. If you squeeze them, try not to break into the peel and let loose the trifoliate oils.
socalnolympia
3 years ago
last modified: 3 years ago
Nice picture.

I have to say, I'm surprised how big those fruits are. They're almost the size of oranges.

I grew several seedlings from seeds of US-852. I don't know, I presume the seeds will mostly be nucellar (genetically identical to the fruit parent), but there is a small chance some of the seedlings might turn out to be zygotic. There can be some genetic rearrangement in that second generation. That means certain dominant alleles can be eliminated, and/or certain recessive alleles can be expressed. So there is the chance that the second generation might have the good traits and not the bad traits, that were not possible in a first generation cross.

US-852 is one of the hardiest cold hardy hybrids. It's a cross between Poncirus trifoliata and Changsha mandarin. (Changsha mandarin is already pretty hardy, can survive and grow vigorously in zone 8a South Carolina). US-852 is also said not to have as much bad poncirus flavor as many of the other poncirus hybrids. It would probably be considered as "being somewhere on the border of edibility and non-edibility". ("edibility" being a very relative word here, subject to varying individual personal opinions). I saw a video of some guy eating them who said he could manage to "enjoy" eating them.

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