Can they be treated like potted figs and brought into the garage to overwinter? I was specifically interested in a small Meyer lemon but am open to other varieties.
Are you referring to plants in the Genus Citrus, or members of the broader family Rutaceae?
Unlike figs citrus grow year around and need light and pest controls. Meyer lemons are extremely hard to grow. Citrus is generally hard to grow in zone 6 unless you live in cloudless winter areas.
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Sure I have done it a lot. Grapefruit / pomelo / oranges/ lemons all make great house plants. They do need a sunny window. If you want to take it up a notch try satsuma which will be new to me All about Satsuma oranges
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I’ve been wondering about if like some of the trifoliate hybrids, because supposedly some can get their leaves froze off and after it warms up again for them they grow and fruit like nothing ever happened. So if they don’t have leaves they don’t need light?
Also possibly the desert lime how they naturally regularly lose their leaves when it gets dry and regrow when watered and s3t fruit.
And also the prague chimera in that the trifoliate part of it makes it go dormant and drop its leaves in the winter.
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They can be grown in zone 6 we are close to trifoliata’s cutoff range which is -15 f to -20F for a few
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I have an Cara Cara Orange tree. While my figs go dormant and take up the garage the Orange stays under lights. So far it blooms for me I the middle of winter and I pollinate it with a snack paint brush. I have friends that also have Citrus grown indoors, but they aren’t going to go dormant like or figs.
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Like all people I consider myself open-minded, and tried trifoliate orange growing on a local tree hoping it would be something citrusy/sour I could work with at least in the kitchen.
They’re not. They’re pretty awful. The fruits are furry like a peach. The interior is almost entirely seeds. They’re very sour, but also bitter, but also very piney, but also don’t contain much juice for their size. If you cut them with a knife, the knife gets covered in pine tar-like resin that soap will not help remove. And if you juice them anyway you’ll need to wait for the resin to float to the top to separate it out to make the juice somewhat palatable. And the resin seems to make some people sick for like a day after ingesting it.
Most of the 50% hybrids that are out there don’t taste very good. “The Mulberries” on YT along with RareNJGrows and Virginia Fruit Grower have some pretty good videos on a lot of the hybrids and relatively hardier citrus worth checking out, but they’re in I think 7b to 8b? And a lot of stuff still has significant die back (or just regular dying).
Growing citrus indoors you may have to deal with mites, scale, and the plant being unhappy about the very low humidity and lack of strong light.
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I’ve seen Calamondin grown and fruit as a house plant in winter and outside spring through fall.
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If you put the effort in to take care of them, make sure they have enough light in winter, and that they don’t freeze when there is fruit or blossoms…yes. I’ve gotten decent crops off my Meyer lemons before when I paid more attention to them
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I’ve grown Meyer lemon down to 30F. Well, stored it, it didn’t grow until spring. If they have fruit I move the indoors fro the winter most of the time. Typically I rotate them so half get to stay in heated space to ripen fruit. IOthers store in a crawl space in the dark. Usually they drop their leaves. I also grow grapefruit in the same manner, and they never lose their leaves in the dark. Obviously I have to prune them short or lay them down. Olives are the most amazing. They easily go down to 28F, and never lose their leaves in 4 months of total dark. Mine are blooming now, and in a hot year they do mature fruit. I make a hobby of such cold defying just to see.
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