I haven't been here much lately. Spring/summer has finally arrived and it has been really wet! Thought I would share some photos, including several topics here. One topic is when do you thin your fruit to preserve the shape of your tree. The other topic is growing other plans in the shade under your citrus. Enjoy and share your thoughts!

I'm not a citrus purist. As long as I don't stunt my citrus, I think it's cool to plant other stuff in the shade of my trees. I may loose a little productivity but at least a couple of shade-loving plants grow great under my citrus.

Ginger in the shade of my tangerine. It's a fun plant to grow and home-made ginger ale has a good bit of lemon juice in it so it's a great citrus go-with for your yard. Plant it on the shaded side of your tree.

Aloe under my calamondin tree. I have to be careful not to hit the aloe when I use the weedeater!

Next few photos are Ponderosa lemons. I have 23 Ponderosas planted around my yard, all from seed and ranging from a couple of feet tall to mature trees, 10 or 15 feet tall. Some of my tees I just assume will be production trees and will droop to the ground on heavy production years. I have to prune the limbs back now and then since the limbs that droop stay low after the lemons are harvested. I have a few trees that are young but have their first fruit this year. I would like a few of those trees to keep their nice, upright, shape but I really hate to pick off the lemons since it was so fun to see them bloom and set fruit this year. I could prop up each lemon I guess but this tree set about 25 fruit this year. That's a lot of prop-up sticks and then it's problematic keeping the grass mowed around the tree. The new lemons are mostly in the crown where they will have a lot of leverage and weight to bend the branches down.

Here is another Ponderosa that use to have a nice upright shape. I pruned it pretty heavy last fall and even the more upright limbs are already drooping and the fruit are a long way from full size.

Now some miscellaneous.

Meyer I am not thinning fruit from for a change this year. It's been pretty pale all spring. I have fertilized several times but I think it's older leaves and some stress from soggy soil. It's been a really wet spring.

A fairly new Satsuma orange. I thinned most of the fruit off this spring to encourage growth.

Left to right, Satsuma orange, kumquat, and blood orange.

Finally getting blood oranges this year! I thought about naming each fruit since I'm so happy to finally be getting fruit from this big-ole tree but there are about 30 oranges so I skipped naming them :>)

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This spring, I pruned off a branch from the new Satsuma. It had some new buds on it so I tried grafting them into some of the Ponderosa trees. All the buds died except this one and I haven't been able to get it to grow out. I snipped the branch off above it but maybe not down close enough to the graft. The branch re-sprouted above the graft. Do you think this bud will re-sprout now that the original bud-growth has died and healed over (leaf scar)?

Happy citrusing everyone!