Growing Citrus in Marginal Zones | Volunteer Gardener

Did you know it's lemon harvest time in Tennessee? Did you know you could even grow lemons in Tennessee? Well, you certainly can as a houseplant during the winter, obviously. Or I have a couple of interesting ways that you can overwinter your lemon trees or other citrus for that matter. This is a big variegated lemon here next to me that I've just cut these two fruit off of and I have several more to harvest. But I also have lime trees, I have a navel orange, I have another sweet orange, and a couple of others. And I have learned a really good way of overwintering these without having to drag them in my house actually. I'm lucky that I have a storage room on the back of my house and I also have a garden shed. And these citrus actually overwinter in my garden shed unheated. I have a small space heater that if it gets down into the teens and I think the interior of the garden shed might freeze hard, I start that small space heater, run it for overnight for however many nights it's going to be in the teens, and then I shut it off. There are a couple of advantages to that. It keeps the trees dormant. You can see that these have actually, some of them, lost their leaves for the winter. And that is okay. The stems are green clear to the top. I moved these out a couple of days ago and in two or three weeks, you'll never know they were leafless. They'll have all new growth on them. It also really encourages them to flower. This is the navel orange down here, this little short one. And you can see that it is loaded with flower buds. I won't let very many of these develop if it sets fruit at all because the tree is still pretty small. I might let two or three mature on this. And then more as the tree gets bigger. Every tree that you see here started in a one-gallon pot, less than 12 inches tall. These smaller trees are about two to three years old and just coming into being bearing age. And the big variegated lemon that we started on, I've had for about a decade. It's about sitting in its pot. It's about eight feet tall and about four and a half feet wide. And that is as big as I will let it get because that is the size that will, if you are careful and bend the branches inward just a little bit, it will fit in through a standard size doorway. And that's how I can get it in and out for the winter months. So these actually do overwinter in my garden shed, as I said before. And I just don't let them freeze hard. They will tolerate 35 degrees with no problem at all. The other thing that that does is it keeps my pest population down to a bare minimum in the wintertime. Anybody who has tried to grow citrus indoors as a houseplant knows that all winter long you fight spider mites, you fight scale insects, and you fight mealy bugs. If you can overwinter them in a cold situation, cold enough to keep the bug population at bay, you'll have a much easier time of it. My other trick is that about a month before these go indoors for the winter, which is usually at the end of October, first of November, I spray them every week with safer insecticidal soap. So that's something that you can use safely, safe for you, safe for your pets, safe for the fruit. And that smothers a lot of those mealy bugs and spider mites and scale insects so that you're not bringing them indoors with you. As you can see, most of my citrus trees are growing in clay pots, especially as they get larger. There are a couple of reasons for this. The roots like to be able to breathe and the clay pots can breathe, whereas plastic pots don't. The other thing is once these trees are up five, six, seven feet tall, the weight of the clay pot helps to keep them from blowing over. If they're in plastic pots, they get very top heavy very quickly and every time the wind blows out here on my hill, they're all laying on the ground and they're a little bit brittle. So I like to not have that happen if we can help it. Now just up here, this is the new crop of flowers coming on for this spring and there are little flower buds emerging all over the plant. So not only have the lemons turned yellow, the mature ones turned yellow, but the new crop is starting and that's one of the ways you know that it's time to harvest. And if you look just here, you'll see a tiny little lemon. That's next year's lemon starting now at the end of March and it will take about nine months for them to ripen. So I'll be able to start harvesting these in about early December and they will continue to ripen through the winter. And once they're ripe, they can actually hang on the tree for three or four months and not spoil. So you can, once they've turned yellow, you can just leave them hanging on the tree and harvest them as you need them and have a fresh supply of lemons all winter long. If you like this video, we've got a wide range of gardening related topics here on our channel. Home garden tours, plant showcases, tips from growers, and much more. Take a dive into our archive and be sure to click to subscribe so you can catch all of our new topics. Until next time.