Saturday I went to Plantapalooza at the El Dorado Garden & Nursery. What a great show. With 27 educational booths, including many of the nursery’s vendors, were on hand to share their knowledge on a wide range of garden related topics. Local garden show host, Farmer Fred (farmerfred.com) gave a presentation on what varieties of veggies to grow and when to plant them. There was also a presentation on citrus trees, another on soil, compost, and how to get it just right. The last was on fruit trees generally by Burchell Nursery. I want to talk about some of the offerings and share a few of the tips I picked up.
Let me start with the fruit. I also had the absolute best, sweetest plum I’ve ever tasted in my life – Lavender Showers. I’d plant 4-5 if I had the space. It was that good. It’s a new variety Burchell was testing at the show. It was soft, amazingly sweet, and run down your face juicy. This is a fruit meant to be eaten outdoors. If you live in Norther California, call your local nursery and tell them you want to buy one of these trees. I promise it will be the best plum you’ve ever had.
Do you have a fruit tree that’s not putting on new growth? I do and I haven’t been able to figure out what’s wrong with it. It’s been in the ground 2 years and is still alive, but has put on zero new growth since it was planted. Apparently, if the top most roots are covered with dirt, that signals the tree to stop growing. Simply uncovering those roots will get the treeing growing again. I love a simply solution.
Have you tried to protect your citrus trees from a hard frost with Christmas light before? I tried this over a Christmas we were out of town and temps were forecast to drop into the 20’s. I had a very elaborate system set up with waterproofing of the extension cords and a timer. These were newer trees, so I was really worried about losing them. Well, the short story is that it didn’t work. Luckily, the trees only suffered damage to the top of their small canopies
What I learned at Plantapalooza was that I really didn’t need to bother with any of that. Most Citrus trees can tolerate down to 26° for periods of about 4 hours. Rarely do the temps get this low for 4 hours in California. If it’s going to be a sustained hard freeze or temps are expected to go below 26°, you can use Christmas lights to provide that extra bit of heat. What you need to know is what type of lights they’re talking about. These are no your generic, small, indoor/outdoor lights. Those lights are LED and put off no heat. Your backyard may look like Main Street at Disneyland, but it won’t help the trees a bit. You need to use the standard outdoor Christmas lights, commonly marked C7 or C9 – and be sure they’re not LED.
That’s all for now, but I’ll post more of interesting info I picked up in my next post.
Gardening Ideas 