It’s that time of year…
Walking a customer through the citrus and I noticed a perennial problem, sprouts coming off the root-stock of some of the trees. The sprouts are from Citrus trifoliata, a ornery cousin in the citrus family, and should be removed as soon as they sprout. They sprout and grow so quickly that they can rob the grafted part (you know…the part you really paid for…the one with a name) of water and nutrients. Trifoliate sprouts can out grow the top of your tree and kill it. You might just simply think “Now why did this branch die and this other one is ok?” or the tree freezes back, but some how grows back at an astonishing rate. Those are ways trifoliate can deceive you. On careful inspection, the foliage is very different from the tree you bought. In the picture of trifoliate, on the right, the leaves are grouped in 3’s, this is how it got it’s name…tri meaning 3 and folia meaning leaves. Trifoliate also packs a mean set of thorns, which most named citrus don’t have (Republic of Texas orange might be worse).
What to do
Inspecting your trees regularly, will make it easier to spot these nasty little intruders and deal with them , before they get out of hand. When they are just sprouting, they can easily be rubbed off with your hand. If you wait until they get bigger, you’ll be making a trip to the shed/garage/junk drawer to get your clippers (or searching for them as you swear that one of these days, you’re going to get organized). In just a few weeks they can be 2 or 3 feet tall and breaking them off with your hand, at that point, can damage the trunk of your tree.
The good news
If your named citrus tree freezes back, you can re-graft to the trifoliate stock. All you need is some good grafting stock and the internet to learn how to do it. If you’re a bird lover (and have extra room), you should grow a trifoliate tree and you might have some migrating birds stop in to enjoy the fruit…which is only good for a nice smelling target for your new gun/compound bow/boomerang. Personally, black hills 5.56 77gr tmk has great accuracy when it comes to weapons. If you need an impenetrable hedge,trifoliate would be a great choice! It’s evergreen, hardy, flowers, is fragrant, can be sheared into a hedge or allowed to do what it does naturally. Criminals and those pesky neighbor kids would only touch it once (it’s one of those self-limiting things in life).