I'm NOT completelt sure but I'll still answer.

My Lemon seedling suffered from curly and twisting leaves, with slightly yellowish/pale tips after watering with fertilizer. It took two flushes of growth to stabilize, and now the new growth looks normal.

So my diagnosis for it was clearly some burn to the roots due to over-fertilizing.

My bigger mandarin can handle pretty big amounts of fertilizer, but I do flush it once in a 3 month schedule due to wrong NPK in my fertilizer and avoid excess salt buildup in soil. I'm actually surprized how much they can take versus my other plants.

My advice would be to flush the roots and soil now and then if possible, and if the plants are growing and look healthy, it's fine. Don't push them too hard, because recovery form saltburns and overfertilizing may take a long time.

Well that's encouraging. This area is too cold for citrus in the winter, so they need to be covered up and there is some damage, thus my interest in rapid growth during the summer. Losing flowers for more leaves may not be a bad thing in my case, as the trees are so small they won't be producing much fruit anyways. I'm going to try to improve the winter protection next year as well.

I'm keeping my eyes open for a reasonably priced citrus specific fertilizer ratio.

nice,

For quite young trees trading flowers for more leaves is good; we sometimes overdose our young field Meyers intentionally with Nitrogen for exactly that reason.

That's good. I should clarify i'm not adding much fertilizer at this point: maybe a couple of tablespoons of 202020 per week. Maybe 1 tablespoon of ammonia sulfate per week.

I was going to start ramping it up this week, as we're hitting the active growing season.

Everything I do for my young citrus is for quick early growth. My Meiwa kumquat grows so slowly that it is meaningless to growth if I pick the young fruits or let everything ripen. I'll let the kumquat keep all its fruit and it grows. I can eat my quats and have growth to. All other citrus fruitlets I pick.

6b Steve

Yes - what John and Steve said... great info! With my in-ground citrus in areas that are borderline and have freezes, it is desirable for me to get that tree as large as possible as fast as possible so that it can survive the random low temperature dips. I've bumped the feeding along with the water (if you feed, you must water) and trim off excess fruit. For my Myers, it is difficult to get them down to 6-10 fruit each as they seem to insist on producing much more - and to their own detriment.

I put my trees in the east window to follow to the south window and outside for the western sun set for solar acclimation. At sunset I take the trees in and put them in my bucket light for 4 more hours of growing light. This extra 4 hours makes the biggest difference in the faster growth.

6b Steve

John, I'm interested in your field trials. How much exactly was too much? How big were the trees?