Despite my neglect
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZB-DmMrwlE
Very nice. I had no idea that a dark garage is better than a sun room.
I doubt it is better in that dark garage, but the dry conditioned air inside was my issue I believe. Can’t convince my wife not to heat the house. I get in enough trouble with the garage.
Why Dear,
I am certain when we discused your car in the garage for
winter we were discussing next winter not this winter. Next winter, next
winter there is always next winter.
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I move my container citrus into the unheated garage as well, rather than the sunroom which caused similar problems. I think it was exposure to sunlight combined with roots that were too cool to keep up. Wrapping the pots with something to warm them (like old strings of Christmas lights) helped a lot but scale was still a big problem. I now just move them in when we’re expected to drop below freezing for an extended period of time.
I thought the problem with moving plants/trees like citrus indoors had more to do with the amount/intensity of sunlight relative to the temperature than it had to do with humidity. I thought trees could tolerate less sunlight better if they were kept cooler, but warmer temperatures make trees want to be more physiologically active but then the sunlight isn’t there to support the greater activity.
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Strudeldog, what do you think of Meiwa kumquats? Do you (and any other people you’ve shared them with) like them just for fresh eating?
You very well could be right Cousin, That makes sense. All I know was the results I had. My sunroom is total windows 3 sides but is a north facing on the length of the house and not lighted except natural light most the time and maybe not enough for the around 60-68 F we keep the house in winter. I probably stand a better chance of rotating the house to a southern exposure than lowering the thermostat any further and lighting the sunroom at night. Actually that room is closed off at night and much cooler then
Don’t take my word for it. I really don’t know, but that’s just what I thought. I’m certainly no expert, barely even a beginner when it comes to potted perennials, house plants, greenhouses, etc.
A sunroom on the north side of the house? I’d actually like to rotate my house, too. I don’t have a sunroom, but I have a big porch on the south side of my house, and it means I don’t hardly get any sun in the house in the winter. I’d much rather have some shade from the hot afternoon summer sun on the west side of my house. I think a lot of time things like porches and sunrooms are placed relative to the road rather than relative to the sun.
Here’s my Owari satsuma. This is the 3rd year it’s fruited for me. It fruited the first year even though it was tiny. I think that’s why it didn’t fruit any the 2nd year. I think my daughter counted 39 fruits this year. We’ve eaten two so far, but they’re mostly not completely ripe yet, or at least they don’t look completely ripe yet. I’m also in zone 7. We got down right around 0F the winter before last and pretty close to 0F the winter before. All I’ve done for protection is to stack some water buckets next to the tree for the winter and then cover with a blanket – the tree has gotten big enough it takes two blankets now – on any night when any of the forecasts calls for a low below 25. It’s supposed to be hardy a lot lower than 25, but I figure the forecast could be off by as much as 10 degrees. A lot of times if there are a few cold nights in a row, I’ll just leave it covered up day and night for those few days. I try to uncover it at least every few days. I don’t really know if what I’ve been doing makes sense – I may be taking unnecessary precautions – but I’ve been happy with the results so far anyway. I have also been covering the tree on less cold nights until I’ve gotten all the fruit harvested. I know the tree is supposed to be hardy to the mid-teens, but I don’t know about the fruit. My biggest concern with this tree is that the rootstock is growing much faster than the tree. I think I’ve heard that can lead to problems. I’ve wondered if a bridge graft can ever help a tree where the rootstock is outgrowing the top.
The fruit quality is outstanding, by the way. I love 'em and so does the rest of my family.
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Yes I like them for fresh eating and most folks I have given them to do. They are not the quality of flavor of your Owari or most my citrus, the fact that you just eat them peel and all Is great we just walk by grab a couple and pop them down.
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Strudeldog (or anyone else), how long can you leave an evergreen tree like citrus in a cold dark garage? I guess with a garage you can simply open the door on warm days for some light. Is that what you do? I don’t have a garage, but I have an outbuilding that barely gets below freezing in the winter. Young potted figs and pomegranates and other such things have overwintered very well in that building, but they haven’t had leaves in the winter like citrus.
I remember reading some people leave theirs in all winter. I’ve never tried that long and the climate here is warm enough that I can keep them outdoors for much of the winter. I have brought citrus into an unheated, dark garage for a few weeks though with no problems.
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I used to leave my Satsumas, Oranges and a Lemon in an unheated garage over winter. I would leave them in all winter long and water them very sparingly maybe a couple times a month. They would drop lots of leaves and look horrible but they would always recover very quickly when I put them out in spring. I did this for the better part of ten years. I now keep them in my greenhouse and that is working out fine as well.
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There’s a lot of info on the various citrus forums about leaf drop and indoor temps. To summarize it, it is fairly common for potted citrus to have a big leaf drop after being brought indoors each fall. The reason is usually that the roots are too cold to function (<50F) and the leafs are getting light and trying to draw water from the roots. Solutions are to heat the roots/pots so that they are well above 50F all the time. Or keep the trees out of sun (like a garage) so that there is no draw on the roots. Adding to the problem is most folks try to water more when this happens, but that just rots the roots which are too cold to use any of that water.
Many variations on the solutions to this. One poster paints one half of the pots black other white. In winter the black side faces the sun, white in the summer. That seems to help, at least in sunny climates. Another problem is that often windows do not go down low enough to let sun hit the pot as well as the leaves.
Much has been written, probably worth a look if you are dealing with this issue…
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[quote=“Steve333, post:14, topic:7914”]
The reason is usually that the roots are too cold to function (<50F) and the leafs are getting light and trying to draw water from the roots. Solutions are to heat the roots/pots so that they are well above 50F all the time. [/quote]
I’ve read all those theories but they don’t explain how my potted citrus do fine in a sunny greenhouse with roots at ~45F and colder at night. I’m running my greenhouse on chill cycle right now. Today was 38F low and 50F high. Potted citrus does fine. No leaf drop and the sun was shining all day long. I don’t know what those people are doing wrong but potted and in ground citrus does fine all winter with 45 to 80 days straight in various yrs at those temperatures.
It also doesn’t explain how CA citrus survives their winters. The surface soil falls to 45F there in winter. Sure it’s warmer down past 1-2ft but not that warm.
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@fruitnut I think it has much to do with a combo of window placement and how sunny people’s sun rooms are. I too am now growing my potted citrus in a GH; it’s not perfect but I no longer get the leaf drop I had when overwintering them at the S windows of our living room before taking soil temps into account.
I think the problem in my house was the windows all ended 2’ from the floor. That meant on sunny days the leaves got warmed and sun but the pots (on the floor) were in the shade, and since we primarily use a wood stove for heat, the room was not that warm near the outside walls. In the GH the winter sun can hit the citrus pots (glazed down to a few inches of soil level) and an imbalance between leaf heat/sun and root temps does not happen, or not much. I don’t think the theory is claiming low root temps are bad (otherwise putting the post in an unheated garage would kill them). The trees just can’t handle low root temps when the leaves are warm and getting sun and need to transpire. When I first heard of this theory, I put a thermometer in my citrus pots and they were cold, barely 50F some days even when the rest of the room was high 60’s. So it made sense to me, and the changes I made seem to work.
To be fair, there is more to the theory than just soil temps, such as a need to slowly acclimate the trees to lower light levels rather than a sudden switch one afternoon, both coming and going. My trees are too big now to bring them back inside the house for a winter, so I’ll leave it to others to experiment with how this theory works if they are interested. But it did seem to work for me.
I can see where the low humidity inside a house combined with warm sun on the foliage and cool soil might well cause issues. But I’ve been known to pop my greenhouse up to 80-100F in January while the soil is still near it’s coldest. Doing that drops humidity down to 5% or less. I would get about 10% leaf drop in Febr but that’s pretty normal in spring and not enough to have any effect.
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I think that is a big part of it. Also I think a day or two, or a few hours here or there is within the trees’ limits of what they can handle. Day after day of warm leaves and roots that cannot supply water leads to the massive leaf drops many people see a few weeks after moving indoors.
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That’s interesting @fruitnut. I know that warming the pot cured the leaf drop issue on my Meyer lemon when overwintering in a sunroom. Now if it could also kill all the scale 
!
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When I was moving my citrus into an unheated unlit garage, again which I did for a number of years, the trees would often drop leaves. They would drop lots and lots of leaves some years. But when I put them back outside in spring they would go right back to growing leaves and bloom shortly thereafter and produced a good crop. The leaf loss never seemed to bother anything so I never minded.