100% you can grow satsumas or Sugarbelle with modest protection.
I’m about halfway between you and MG in terms of zone and geography.
I’ve got Owari, Kimbrough, Silverhill, and Xie Shan. Most satsumas in the US are just bud mutations or nucellar (generic clones) seedlings of Owari. There’s not a whole lot of difference between them usually other than ripening time. Xie Shan is a bit different and people seem to prefer the flavor (I bought mine last year, hasn’t fruited yet). All are very good, they’re juicy, sweet, seedless, zipper peel, and tasty with a nice mandarin flavor.
The single Owari that didn’t drop during the June drought ended up getting huge. I should have left it on the tree a little longer for more ripening, but there was a hard frost coming and I hadn’t set up my protection by then. Tasted great!
Sugarbelle I’ll be getting this spring. It’s quite different from a satsuma. It’s a cross between clementine and mineola. The ones I had were not nearly as easy to peel as a satsuma, closer to a clementine. I’d say they’re more complex tasting. Mandarin is the main flavor, but with a touch of orange like a clementine has. There’s a bit of a grapefruit flavor in the background that’s similar to mineola. Mine were pretty tart, but they were also picked too early. Sugarbelle has seeds, but they’re fairly small and aren’t that numerous.
Both are quite good looking plants from what I’ve seen. Most Satsumas have a weeping habit that’s very pretty if a bit annoying to keep off the ground. Sugarbelle is more upright. Both are dense and have attractive leaves. Satsumas are slower growing, Sugarbelle is supposed to be pretty vigorous. I believe Sugarbelle also gets bigger overall.
For protection I use Christmas lights, water containers, frost cloths, and microclimates. I sometimes their a tarp over them as well if it’s going to be windy. Personally, I like to protect during the first few freezes even if they’re mild, otherwise new growth tends to get zapped (even in the upper twenties) and of course smaller trees need more protection. Also useful for protecting fruit while getting in that last bit of ripening (which I didn’t actually do this year unfortunately). Later in the winter I baby them less. The lights I leave on them all winter, turning on when needed, and the water I also just leave, the covers I take off when not needed because my yard isn’t very private and I don’t want the neighbors getting upset… Ideally you just leave the first cloth on though. In your zone you’ll get some real cold nights, so you probably want to have plenty of Christmas lights and maybe a second layer of frost cloth for those really cold nights.
Keep in mind that lights themselves do almost nothing because the heat just blows away. But lights make frost cloth way more effective by continuously adding a little bit of heat. Alone, neither are that great, together they can add as much as ten degrees from what I can tell.
Also, while the trees will survive very low temperatures, you probably will want to protect enough to prevent defoliation and die back as that can reduce your harvest. How much that is exactly is mostly trial and error. Just remember the first winter is the hardest one regardless of how cold it actually gets.
But yeah, aside from winter protection, which can be pretty low effort if you do it right, citrus in our area are super easy. No spraying, no real pest issues, self fertile, precocious, productive, and pretty ornamental. They are heavy feeders, especially for N, iron, and trace minerals, but they reward you for fertilizing them with better growth than most fruit trees. They’re very drought tolerant but prefer regular watering. They do need good drainage, though Poncirus rootstock helps with that. They’re understory trees naturally, but at our latitude full sun is probably best (you do lose a little hardiness not being under cover, but if you’re already having to protect I feel like it’s not worth the trade off in growth and productivity).
