I have already prepared inexpensive aluminum tags made from soda cans and garden wire ties then etched with ballpoint pen.
I already have these citrus cultivars but it is always good to start with certified disease free budwoods with the correct cultivar names to do my grafting. I usually regraft for balance, or for people requesting me to regraft their trees with cultivars that they want. One of the reasons that I reorder the cultivars that I already have growing is that I lost their tags (blown off by wind or stripped off by animals) and I want to be sure I have the correct cultivar. This is especially true with oranges and mandarins that look very similar to each other.
As long as humans are cutting and bagging scion wood there is room for error. Of course I would trust UC more than a retail big box store but just thought I would plant that seed of doubt for you!
How do you like Tarocco compared to Moro? I’ve only ever had Moro but OGW sells Tarocco on Flying Dragon which interest me.
There’s always room for error where humans are involved. So far for me, the CCPP staff have been 100% accurate in all of the budwood orders that I have requested for more than 15 years. There are SOP’s in place and GMP’s to insure the highest accuracy.
Often in stores or nurseries, where labels can accidentally drop and an employee who have no knowledge about cultivar differences have to put them back. then the mislabeled item gets to the buyer, or the buyer lost the tags and misremember the names, and then after sometime gets propagated as scionwood in the exchanges, and the grafter lost the tags and misremember… and so the end result is that about 15% of the cultivars in the scionwood exchanges are mislabeled.
That’s why when I order stuff from germplasm repository, I used the best labels for them.
I love Moro, but I love Tarocco much better. The ones from the stores don’t do justice to the potentially very tasty Tarocco.
I am evaluating various Tarocco variants. There’s Thermal, Bream and the newest one that I got #7. These are all variants of Tarocco. So far, growing them in my yard, I like Bream the best, I don’t know yet about Tarocco #7, and that is something I look forward to.
Most citruses grafted on FD have the best fruit quality, but the yield is proportional to the size of the tree, and the size of anything grafted in FD becomes ultradwarf version of the cultivar. So I use trifoliate to get medium sized tree, still very good quality fruits and higher production than the FD. You can of course achieve the same production with FD per unit land, just use more of it and plant high density. FD are good for container growing.
I’ve been wondering about Tarocco #7 and why CCPP doesn’t have regular Tarocco. Now I finally found the answer. According to the Citrus Production Manual, Tarocco#7 is the same as the regular Tarocco.
Joe, the Thong Dee sionwood you send me are doing really good, made three, one smaller. My citrus collection is completed. Got a diverse collection good enough for a guy living in Arkansas.
Joe, from what you’re growing, what are your most tasty varieties? I know you have a ton of experience with citrus.
These are the two out of three.
