Yes, so that’s just about exactly one year from when I rooted the twig. I selected fruit for fresher looking twigs in the bin, and ended up with two failed grafts (no success there) and this one that rooted successfully out of 3 attempted.
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Yep, those are the ones. Did any of them root for you?
Dunstan, Sudachi, and Ichandrin are all still green but have not pushed any new growth. I’ll wait for new growth before checking for roots.
I grafted Meiwa (which looks to have taken, but no new growth there either).
Carrizo failed to root, with the leaves dropping and stems wilting within a month.
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I have limited experience rooting citrus cuttings. Is it common for them to get many new leaves but no roots for a couple months? The flying dragon cuttings I’m doing have lots of new leaves but no sign of roots. They pushed out many leaves within a couple days.
Prior to starting this thread, I’d never rooted any citrus before, either, so I’m not sure what’s normal for flying dragon in particular. At some point the wood will run out of nutrients and need some roots to survive.
Are they under a grow light? On a heating pad? The light will help the leaves produce sugars, which can trigger roots to form as they build up in the buried stem. Mine was on a heating pad when it succeeded, but I’m not sure how important that is.
Yep, on a heating pad with a humidity dome.
If you look at the first pic the flying dragon are pushing lots of tiny leaves, but no roots. They were bare short twigs taken from a dormant tree.
There are also sudachi cuttings in that same container. I put them into the soil with leaves, and immediately the put out blooms and new growth. Hopefully a few make it.
Id rather buy trifolia hardy orange seeds, grow those out and then eventually graft onto them and see if those take, never tried it before - just an educated guess 
I grow the flying dragon from seed too. For some reason I’m having problems getting seedlings to take from this batch. They germinate fine but then stall and never push through the surface. My best guess is they were exposed to the elements for too long before I gathered them up for germination. These fruit were ripe last August and September, so they’d been in the mud under the tree since late last summer before I brought them inside. I figure I have nothing to lose trying to root the cuttings. I already have the heating pads and humidity domes set up.
Since the mandarin worked this time last year, I took some cuttings of my trifoliate and stuck them in soil last month. I’m going to need some outside rootstocks later, in case my greenhouse Prague grafts take.
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That’s beautiful to see.
Dunstan is just now starting to push new growth, so looks like it successfully rooted:
The other two still look to be alive to varying degrees, and the buds have swollen ever so slightly, but no growth yet:
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If you end up with an extra Sudachi or Ichandrin on its own roots, let’s talk.
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I’ve got both. Are we talking? haha
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That’s great. I’ve got lots of seedlings of all those varieties plus some rooted meiwa if you’re interested in any of those. I also have meyer from the seedling meyer tree and satsuma from those fruit. The satsuma are out of this world flavorful, though I have no idea how they’ll do up here. They do great in NorCal. So probably be an excellent greenhouse tree in the PNW. The meiwa produces loads of fruit for me in a 15 gallon container in Salem. Meiwa have excellent fruit. The Prague citsuma are coming soon!
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yes
The free market has spoken on which citrus root easily. Lemon and lime are widely available as rooted cuttings. All else are grafted rootstock. Trifoliate can be rooted. However I had one trifoliate cutting go a year and not root, still green. Much easier to grow by seed. Currently trying to root red finger lime(not a lime) as I had a few cuttings available. Usually I thow them away since they are extremely thorny. The frost series of “cold hardy” citrus used to be available as rooted cuttings. They sold the propagation rights to Saxon Bechnel and they graft them now.
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There are a number of reasons that could be true, including simply the fact that “it works” to graft almost anything, and you can somewhat control tree size with rootstocks, so it’s possible that many nurseries just do it “the way it is done” without really trying other methods. Why fix what works!
For my greenhouse citrus, they are mostly grafted trees (mandarins, at least) or nucellar seedlings (e.g., key limes), but for the things that I’m thinking about trialing outdoors (with some protection), I’d prefer them on their own roots if at all possible, even if it is harder to do than grafting. That way when they are inevitably killed back to their roots at some point, at least there is a chance their roots could regrow! Dunstan, Yuzu, Sudachi, etc., all fall in this category. I may try a satsuma with more significant protection at some point, and would prefer to have that on its own roots, too.
I have a meiwa that I grafted on a lemon seedling before I learned about them having lots of graft compatibility issues, so it may not make it. It has budded out extremely slowly and hardly grown in months. But I’m not a huge fan of any kumquat, to be honest. I was mainly just trying it to see how it did, not with any great excitement.
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mrtexas is correct about Meyer lemon. I got tired of rooting the stuff I pruned off of my tree. Even whole branches seemed to get roots eventually.
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I tried rooting flying dragon cuttings from my own Meyer’s lemon’s root stock, it rooted very slowly 2/3 of the cuttings did not make it, and then the remaining 1/3 of the cuttings took years to get half decent roots, and then someone accidentally killed it on me be disturbing the soil in the pot, and taking like 3 or 4 days to tell me about it. I suspect that what makes it a dwarfing root stock, also makes it a slow and poor rooter, although I have never tried rooting any other Trifoliate orange, so I could not truly compare.
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Yeah, what you describe is pretty common for most people. I do the rooting attempts mainly for the science of it. To get rootstocks for grafting I grow many flying dragon from seed. They are super easy to germinate, though I have noticed that at least for me they are slower to germinate than the other citrus seeds. Yuzu pops up for me in sometimes as little as 5 days if the soil temp is 90 f.
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