I have two large luscious citrus trees I’ve been growing for a few years in my garden. They produce copious amounts of beautiful looking fruit. The problem is it’s late ripening, in the spring. By the time it’s ripe, most of the fruit are dry and woody on the inside. I’m assuming this is because of freezing during the coldest part of the winter, damaging the cells in the fruit? No way around this than passive heating / greenhouse type solutions? It’s a shame, but I’m thinking to cut these trees down as I never get to use any of the fruit.
By contrast, my trees that are able to ripen before January have normal looking fruit.
Dry fruits like this mean that the fruit has ripened (seeds maturation is completed) and stayed hanging in the tree for months until it became like this. Common in orange producing areas…
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But I had the same issue with all the fruit on 2 different varieties, picking earlier in the season well within ripening time. Only 1 fruit looked normal - it had been half buried in the ground. Thus my theory of protection from freezing.
Mine looked like that but my tree started slowly wilting and the fruit got softer. It was good but the trees died. I think in my case the roots were cold for so long the tree top desiccated before the roots warmed up enough to work again.
freeze damage
ok while reading this, what temperature can damage the citrus fruit? I was always wondering about it. I thought it could be around 26F or so but my friend was insisting fruit like kumquat can survive much lower temps and ripen in the spring. I highly doubted it but didn’t want to argue since he is more experienced and has way more citrus trees than me