Mike, I'll try to answer them! 1. When you say that, are you talking about Miracle Grow? A bag of soil, not soilless mix bought at a store? Unamended? No added perlite or organics? Answer: I use the typical mixes sold at Home Depot and Lowes or nurseries. I've used Miracle Grow, but I tend to pick up Pro-Mix or Peters Professional. All are used right out of the bag with no amendments at all. 2. Do you store your plants in very cool rooms all winter? Answer: Not recently, but a couple of the oldest and biggest spent about 45 days in the unheated but attached garage before they came up to the living room around Xmas (they serve as our Xmas trees, since they come complete with organic ornaments, though we do add lights, more ornaments, and tinsel). In the house most of the plants are in rooms that get no cooler than 65 at night, but my Buddha's Hand Citron does spend the winter in a cooler bedroom (55 to 65) with almost no direct light (it gets about an hour of sun late in the day). Long ago (as in back in the 1980s, when I was in college, the 39 year old orange spent entire winters in the garage (the garage is under the house, but otherwise unheated, and can get down into the low to mid 30s) during periods of near zero temperatures. It never had a problem with this, but one winter it did die back to its roots when my father and brother both thought the other was watering it. When it looked completely dead, my brother John didn't give up on it but watered it and it sprouted. It currently has a trunk diameter of three inches. I posted some pictures about a month ago. 3. How do prevent them from dying of root rot when it rains almost every day in some winters and add sunless days to cool to that? Answer: They are inside from about October 15th or 20th through most of April, so the cold rains of late fall and early spring are not really an issue or at least not an issue for that long. Inside, cloudy days don't seem to cause any problems, though they obviously slow down the transport of water, so I end up watering less frequently. 4. How about cold nights while left outside if the mix is still wet? Answer: They do experience nighttime temperatures down into the 30s in the spring and fall, but this has never been a problem. Of course, it does slow down or delay growth and flowering, but even new fruits set by the plants when inside seem to shrug this off and resume growing once the nights warm a bit. Having lived in Florida from 1990 through 1999, I can tell you that citrus trees down there live through similar weather quite nicely. 5. How do you control salt issues over time? Answer: Our water here in West Hartford, Connecticut, is less hard than in many regions, but is not as soft as some. That said, I don't have salt issues. Possibly this is due to good thorough watering when I water during the inside months, but it is certainly helped by the fact that I water profusely during the heat of summer. 6. How long does it take before your soil mix compacts? Answer: I'm sure it compacts to a degree within a few watering cycles of a repotting, but my experience is that is as far as it goes. The longer term development (after the plants have been in the same soil for a few years) is that much of the organic matter (peat, compost, whatever the mix uses) literally disappears due to the natural breakdown of such material. In effect, this allows more room for the roots, so it all averages out. 7. Do you have problems with fungus gnats? Answer: Never in my citrus, since I put pine bark mulch over the top of the soil, but I do get them when I use the same soil for repotting garden plants in the early spring indoors and in some of my other houseplants that I don't have bark mulch in. I've had a few of them around all this past winter, but I consider them a non-issue. 8. Are your trees in a constant state of very deep rich green color? Answer: No. Late in the summer/early fall, they tend to yellow a bit (partly I'm sure due to the fact that often don't fertilize them after the first week in August, since I don't want a new flush of growth so late in the season, but also, I've read, from the effect of cool temperatures, and of course some of the leaves are yellowing prior to natural leaf drop. As soon as the plants come inside into warmer temperatures, the leaves that are going to fall do that, and the others green up. Some of my trees are clearly greener than others: my Myrtle Leaf Orange is very dark, as are the Buddha's Hand, and the Ponderosa. The Calamondin is a bit lighter, as are my Key Lime and the 39 year old sour orange I started from a seed. The Meyer Lemon varies a bit, but tends to fall in the middle of this range. I have a couple smaller trees that take after their parents in this regard. 9. Pest free all year? Answer: Do you mean apart from the ants that live in a couple of the pots and take the occasional constitutional walk across my computer monitor? :-) I tend to have to spray some of the trees with oil spray to get rid of scale sometime each winter, and I spray with oil spray twice (separated by 10 days to 2 weeks) in the fall before they come inside. Other than that no problems with pests. I haven't had a problem with spider mites, for example, in probably over twenty years. 10. Do they flower profusely? Answer: Indoors they tend to flower a bit intermittently, and this seems largely to be a factor of how much light they get. Some years they've gone crazy. This year, not so much. My old orange and 25 year old Calamondin, for example, did not flower much at all this indoor season, but that is clearly because they are set back from the west-facing picture window by several feet, and other plants are in front of them blocking some of the light. Most of the others also only get about three or four hours (if that) of direct sunlight each winter day, so most of the flowering happens in May through July. 11. How often do you have to do repots? Answer: I went ten years before I repotted the 25 year old Meyer lemon, and probably twice that at one point before I repotted my 39 year old orange which did have that near-death experience, but other plants have been repotted every 5 years or so (or root-trimmed and potted up in the same container) once they reach a certain size. 12. How do you check for moisture? Answer: When they are inside I use two old and trusted methods: 1) I stick my finger down into the soil anywhere from a half inch to an inch and water if it is dry or close to dry. If one plant is dry in a room, I tend to water all the plants in that room. 2) I water when I notice the plants are starting to show leaf curl. The Calamondin is very good at showing this sign. 13. What do you do when your soil mix pulls away from the pot, or does it? Answer: I've never had this problem. 14. Can you water them frequently without fear of root rot? Answer: In the winter I water them as infrequently as every ten days or as frequently as twice a week, depending on their state of growth or dormancy and their location and the "weather conditions" meaning sun levels and temperature. 15. How much sun do they get? Answer: As I said above, when inside, they don't get massive amounts of sun. Those in the south-facing window in my bedroom get about five hours of direct sun when it is shining, but it only hits part of the plants, since they are too high for their tops to be in the direct line of the sun (they rest on my low dresser). The room is quite bright however, so they are happy. Most of the citrus spend the winter in the living room which has a large picture window and two smaller west-facing windows (and a north window that receives some late rays from the setting sun). They get about 4 to 5 hours of direct sun, but as I said those farther back from the windows receive less light. During the summer months (from May through mid-October), the trees are all in my back yard. They receive direct light from about 9 a.m. till as late as 7 p.m. in June, but by mid-September the shadows from trees and the house reduce this period to about 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. In the past I had a couple of them in prime spots on the south side of the house, but for the last few summers they have all been on the east side and they all therefore get about the same amount of sunlight as indicated above, though last summer the Meyer Lemon and the Calamondin both disappeared under a canopy of pole beans which went wild during my absence. 16. How much light during winter? Answer: see above. 17. What kind of water do you use? Answer: I use water out of the tap. Our town has great tasting water. The plants seem to like it too. 18. How often do you feed and how much? Answer: In the indoor season I use Peters (now Jacks, I think) for Acid-loving plants about every 3 to 5 weeks, or even less frequently. I typically use about a third of a teaspoon per half-gallon, and give about a half gallon of this to the larger trees, and a quart to the smaller ones, and then add more water till they all drain into their trays. 19. How long have you had them? Answer: I've had the seed-grown orange for 39 years (while it came from a sweet orange, it produces sour fruit). The Calamondin was purchased on an Xmas visit to Disney in a Disney gift shop (the old citrus in a box) when I was 21, so that would make it 25 as of this past Xmas. I purchased the Meyer Lemon from a now defunct greenhouse and nursery (Whiting Lane) about the same time. I have a Key Lime and a Ponderosa Lemon that I purchased when living in Florida in the early 1990s, so they are about 20 years old (my father took care of the other citrus during that time). The Buddha's Hand Citron is about 8 years old, and the Myrtle Leaf Orange is just over 4. I purchased these two plants at Logee's. 20. Do you have any recommendations for those that prefer soil mixes and tips other than to be careful not to over water? Answer: I think I addressed these questions above, but I will add one more: 21. How do you water the trees during the summer? Answer: For most of the past ten years, I've spent 30 to 45 days abroad, and then the bulk of the summer on Cape Cod, and no one else has been at home, except at rare intervals, so I had to implement a drip-irrigation system. I use the Rain-Drip system, and run anywhere from two to six drip emitters (a mix of 1/2, 1, and 2 gallon-per-hour emitters), depending on the size of the tree into each container. Using more than one emitter is crucial, since a single emitter can clog. The old orange, in a large pot, probably got 4 to 6 gallons of water every day from late June through August. Obviously, on some days and during rainy periods that in the past have lasted a week or more, this can be much more water than the tree needs, (it is more than the plant needs on any day!) but I have to make sure it gets enough water to get through the hot dry days. I've had the plants and the drip system long enough (a decade) that I can definitely say that they are never at risk from over-watering during the summer months since they are all able to drain freely through the patio blocks they rest on. In the past, when I've tried to fine-tune the system to provide just the right amount of water (say two gallons per day for the large orange), I've had problems. See below for details. Normally, I set up the system in mid-June, and leave for England in late June, having had it up and running for about a week or ten days. I typically set it to water every day for 30 minutes. Before I go, I toss a tablespoon or three of slow release fertilizer (Osmocote for Azaleas and other acid-loving plants) into the top of each container (right onto the bark mulch), and figure it will slowly work its way down and release during watering and rain events. The only issues I've ever had with the watering system are 1) once a fitting burst (it was the antisyphon component which is closest to the water source) and the resulting deluge at the base of the foundation flooded the basement with two inches of water (luckily, it happened about two days before I came back for a brief visit). This fitting was not on the citrus line, but it was the same system, so it is not failure-proof!. 2) Over the course of the summer the water pressure can drop a bit, so it is important to check this at intervals, since if it drops too low some parts of the system will stop dripping. I almost lost the Meyer Lemon when this happened about 8 years ago. This is why I always end up giving the plants more water than they need during the summer (but this is basically similar to the situation they would face in their preferred habitat, so I think it is not really a problem). For the record, about twelve years ago the Meyer Lemon yielded a bumper crop of 33 lemons. Since then, it has yielded 25 one year, and most typically between 10 and 20. It has 10 lemons on it now that set last summer, and I've harvested about 8 since last fall--those set last winter. This winter it has only set a couple fruit (I think in part because it was in a dormant phase for most of the winter, but the heavy crop from last winter and last summer may also have made a difference)--then ten fruit from last summer were still growing for most of the winter, though they are now starting to ripen. The lemons are used for cooking, lemon meringue and chiffon pies, and gifts. My seed grown orange has had up to about 200 smallish (up to 2 inches in diameter fruit on in, but this year it has about 75 fruit in the 2 to 2.5 inch diameter range. The oranges are used for cooking (we freeze the extra ones by packing them twenty or so at a time into large freezer bags with no other preparation than a quick rinse). We do the same with the Calamondin fruit. The Key Lime, a smallish tree about three feet high, had about 30 largish limes this year (larger than I've ever had before). It never sets fruit inside for me, but flowers like crazy in June/July. I made two Key Lime pies with them, and still have a few in the fridge that will be used for cooking (they tend to ripen from November through January). The Ponderosa has a couple fruit on it, and I recently made an awesome Lemon-meringue pie with the largest fruit (the recipe called for 1/2 cup of lemon juice and one cup of water, but I reversed this since the lemon yielded a full cup of juice). The Ponderosa is in a bit of an odd situation: it is the probably unhappy host of a passion flower vine that rooted into the pot several years ago, and has grown quite robustly ever since.

Thanks for all the responses. Most of the trees are 8-10 years old. They are all dwarfs -- none of them is more than four or five feet tall. I don't know who my local ag extension agent is or how to get in touch with him/her, but that's a good suggestion -- I'll look into that. The consensus of all the comments seems to be root rot caused by overwatering. It would be hard to overemphasize how dry it is here in the summer. It hasn't rained in a couple of months and normally doesn't rain from about May 1 through Thanksgiving. The irrigation I provide every morning is minimal. It's true that I have been giving some of these trees an extra shot of water in the late afternoon recently -- because the ground is so dry as to be almost lunar. Maybe that extra water created the problem. But that doesn't explain why citrus trees to which I haven't been giving extra water are showing the same symptoms. Plus, we had a rainy spring and they loved that. The affected trees are a pink grapefruit, a Meyer lemon, a navel orange (which has already died), a Valencia orange and now a Bearss lime. Over the weekend, I'm going to try (1) cutting out the affected branches; (2) spraying thoroughly with bug killer, (3) taking affected leaves to the local garden center and (4) looking up the county extension agent. If anyone has any other ideas, please share them. Thanks, Nimzo

Hi, William! Your plants look great! I think the pot size is fine for now, but, you can gently slip one or two out of its pot and get a look at the roots to see if they are growing down and around the soil, and holding it in. If they are, and they are starting to circle, it is time to move them to a pot that is at least few inches bigger in diameter. One pot size up. It is better to up-pot now, than in the winter if you can. You will have them under lights, but, will you be letting them go dormant during the winter?? Some folks don't like growing citrus in Clay pots (I started out with clay) because they dry out so fast, but, it depends on where you live, climate, and how often you plan on watering them. When you upsize, you could switch over to plastic pots, which are easier to monitor for water issues. And, they are lightweight .. I am sure you will get great advice from the pro's on here shortly. You are doing a great job so far!! Nice varieties! !

Hi All, this is my first post to this forum so my apologies if I'm posting to the wrong thread. (?) I have 7 new Apache pine seedlings that I started in seedling starter pods - they are about 2-3 inches in just a 12 days! As the pods are sitting in a base with water that I have under a humidity dome (on heater pad in south window for sun) when should I move those pods out of that water base to a starter pot? I can pick up the individual pods without disturbing the delicate trunks or roots, but not sure a what point I should do so? I know the dry/wet balance is important... thanks for any help!