This is all I know from their description. I purchased them on Etsy for making crosses. These are their photos and their description.
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Looks like a citrange to me. My guess is it’s Carrizo.
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It looks perfect for your zone! I would think since it is hardy to 9F it would do well there.
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The leaves are not consistent with Carrizo. That said, Carrizo would make at least one potentially good parent in a cross with Poncirus+.
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This tree bears a strong resemblance to Swingle Citrumelo, which can survive brief bouts of 0°F. Interestingly, we already have a couple of improved strains of Swingle which have better fruit quality - Iva Swingle Citrumelo and Dingle Citrumelo. These were selections made by Alan Bishop. I have to dig up our old emails, but I believe these were rootstocks which outgrew the scion varieties.
Visually, they might pass for Swingle and thus they avoided the initial culling done by nurseries. However, the fruit on Iva Swingle are larger and less bitter, making them surprisingly edible out of hand! Dingle produces fruit that are perceivably sweet but much more bitter. They measured 12 and 13° Bx respectively.
If they produce even a few zygotic seedlings like Swingle seems to, then these might be worth breeding with since they have better eating qualities, especially Iva Swingle. We have a Swingle seedling selection which produces a high % of monofoliate leaves with good aroma, and it has proven hardy so far. I hope it will produce better fruit as a result.
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Trifoliate hybrids have a lot of variation in leaf form depending on growing conditions. That said, these do look like citrange or citrumelo leaves.
There seem to be a few bifoliate leaves here and there, possibly some monofoliate ones. And all of the leaves have a small winged petiole, and very broad, somewhat rounded main leaves. That matches pretty well with Carrizo, but honestly also with a few dozen other trifoliate hybrids.
Leaves just aren’t a great way to identify trifoliate hybrids, other than ruling stuff out, IMHO.
The fruit are what make me think it’s maybe a citrange rather than a citrumelo. The pith doesn’t look very thick, and the rind is pretty dark. Citrumelos are usually kinda middle of the ground yellow, citranges can have darker yellows or even somewhat orange colored fruits. A few of the fruits on the tree look like they might have a bit of a neck, but it’s hard to tell, all of the close-ups though are very rounded, which again suggests citrange rather than citrumelo.
If it is a citrange, it’s probably Carrizo since that’s by far the most common one; it doesn’t match Kuharske which is another common one, I think Troyer las longer thorns, but I’m not certain on that.
But yeah it could be Swingle or another citrumelo. It’s really hard to say without better photos. Carrizo is just a guess.
Hardy to 9 F isn’t sufficient to be long-term cold hardy in my zone. This past winter I had 9 F in most of my yard, and we get lower single digits every now and then, which will kill a tree hardy to 9 F. But this tree is very likely hardier than 9F. Regardless, citranges in general seem to have worse fruit quality than many citrumelos, and most citrandarins, and they have inferior cold hardiness and, for what it’s worth, don’t seem to have the same level of disease resistance on average. Me personally, I think working with citrumelos and citrandarins is a better bet.
That being said, I do have at least one citrange. I’m growing out Kuharske, which is a seedling of Carrizo. It came as a rootstock for a Kimbrough satsuma, which is one of the cold-hardiest satsumas, but regardless was killed back the winter before last after a few days of repeated nights in the low teens (a temperature which on paper satsumas can handle… but realistically, I really do want to emphasize again, these cold hardy citrus minimum temperatures are about the brief, minutes or hours long freezes on a single night before warmth returns, and are usually measured right at what kills the plant dead, not at the point where the tree takes damage but overall does ok. And with mature trees that aren’t stressed or over-cropped or still recovering from a previous winter’s damage and had a long, hot summer to accumulate sugars). I’m mostly using Kuharske as a rootstock, but I am letting a few waterspouts on it mature just so I can try it and have pollen available if at some point I decide it’ll be useful for some breeding goal.
I’m very hopeful about these kinds of selections. The vast majority of trifoliate hybrids we do have were selected on the basis of being good rootstocks, and consequently tend to have terrible fruit, but the few varieties that have begun accumulating which were selected for fruit quality are already substantially different from typical trifoliate hybrid fruits and not nearly so bad.
And I’m pretty sure there’s a lot more of these kinds entering or soon to enter circulation. For example one of the very first seedlings I selected and started growing out is a zygotic seedling of Dunstan citrumelo with a mixture of leaf types and considerably less bitterness as well. It’ll probably fruit in a few years, at which point we’ll get a better idea of it’s quality and maybe of its paternal parent. And that’s just a random seedling, not counting all the intentional crosses that are being made now.
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That’s awesome about the Dunstan, if you have pictures I would love to see. I have grown hundreds of Dunstan seedlings and only noticed one or two zygotic seedlings, and they weren’t even worth keeping.
That’s exactly right though, this whole time we’ve been working with rootstock varieties which some of them happen to make half-decent fruit. Selecting for fruit quality will surely change the game.
Iva Swingle scored a 66.5/100 for us whereas regular Swingle comes in at 44.5/100. That’s just about a 50% improvement over the original! Not to mention I believe it’s been proving equally or similarly hardy too, so not much compromise there. I would like to see this happen across the board with all of the different trifoliate hybrids.
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I was able to pull up a picture from the Etsy seller who I purchased Troyer Citrange fruit to review. This should be fairly representative, and I believe Troyer/Carrizo appear the same.
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I grabbed a couple more things from your Etsy shop out there. You can ship them at the same time as what I bought from your store direct if you want.
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I appreciate that! I’ll send them out this coming Monday. Your other order should be arriving soon, I shipped it out already! Please PM me if you have any issues with either order.
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This is it
Mixture of leaf types depending on vigor mostly.
The leaves taste pretty clean. Compared to Dunstan, the grapefruit flavor is much more dominant and the bitterness lower. Dunstan to me has a complex grapefruit plus orange (but, the kind of orange you get in trifoliate hybrids, so orangey and a little dank) plus lemon, with a harsh aftertaste. This one, which I’ll probably end up calling Dunson if the fruit are good, is less complex but also less unpleasant.
Here are the leaves compared to Dunstan.
The trifoliate leaves are very similar. This is Woodlanders Dunstan which are seed grown, but I have a graft of the original Dunstan on it and it’s identical. Dunstan definitely produces very high rates of nucellar seeds.
The tree is on its third year. It’s about 5 ½ feet tall, should push past 6 ft before the end of the year. I’ve made one backup graft but it’s still dormant after more than a year so I’ll probably make another backup.
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Wow! You can see the similarities, yet it is definitely distinguishable from any Dunstan I have grown. Hopefully it won’t be too long before you find out what the fruit are like! I would be interested in growing that one.
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Yeah, definitely an F2 seedling. I’m still a bit unsure of it but I’m hopeful. Dunstan is one of the better F1 trifoliate hybrids which is a good place to start from. For a while I was thinking this might be a 10 Degree Tangerine cross but now I think it’s just selfed.
Duncan grapefruit, the grandparent that this likely has more inheritance from, is supposed to be a very flavorful one, which is also good. And it’s considered somewhat early. But that’s for a grapefruit, so early means like January. And Duncan has a very high heat requirement that Dunstan definitely picked up some of. Dunstan also isn’t the most hardy citrumelo. All of those issues, the late ripening, the high heat requirement, and the unexceptional hardiness I’m expecting to see in this plant and likely to a higher degree. Still, worth growing it out to find out, and of course to use in further crosses.
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Dallas and Dustan from woodlanders are shown below. Looks pretty close to yours. Mine arrived recently. They do a great job with packaging and shipping.
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Yep, those look right. And they look healthy, I remember I got mine in late winter a few years back and they were very yellow and sad looking.
Keep in mind that Woodlanders sells most of these as seedlings, so it’ll be a while before they fruit. And as citrumelos they want to get big, like really big, before flowering.
Here’s mine that I bought in 2023. It’s about 15 ft tall now. No blooms yet.
I suspect it’ll flower the spring after next.
Funny enough, a younger US-942 nearby has almost caught up to it in height. But it’s not as full so I’m not expecting flowers on it either.
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What are you feeding those? They look great!
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US-897 rather. Which is interesting since it’s a dwarfing rootstock.
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Lots of sun, rain, and heat.
I do fertilize my trees with general purpose fertilizer and sometimes pelletized urea, but honestly these days it’s probably like once or twice a year that I get around to it…
My soil is decent and loamy which I think they appreciate. I’m on a slope and for sure get nutrients leeching down from the sceptic tanks of the various neighbors uphill from me. The water table gets pretty high though so anything sensitive to root rot really doesn’t like must of my yard. Trifoliate hybrids fortunately handle that just fine.
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I noticed this! Having picked Dunstan fruits for several years in a row now, the hottest Summers actually resulted in better-tasting fruit.
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@themulberries @a_Vivaldi they should taste wonderful here. Lol
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