[ Lost in the Landscape ]

citrus birthday presents

My father’s 92nd birth­day was last week, and some of my fam­ily con­gre­gated yes­ter­day to cel­e­brate at his house in Ocean­side. He’s not one to make much fuss about his age, main­tain­ing he doesn’t ever feel old. I think he appre­ci­ated that we’d switched the dig­its on his birth­day candles.

His cur­rent house is on a res­i­den­tial lot planted with a guava tree and sev­eral kinds of cit­rus. When we left, we were sent home with a cou­ple bags of tan­ger­ines and tan­ge­los, sort of a reverse birth­day present. Here’s the counter this morn­ing, after we’d already helped our­selves to sev­eral of the presents.

Because of the warm win­ters, we strug­gle to grow cer­tain kinds of fruit–apricots, for instance–but at least cit­rus does well. Unfor­tu­nately, where my father lives, along with much of San Diego County, is under a cit­rus quar­an­tine against the Asian cit­rus psyl­lid that pro­hibits mov­ing plants around. [ My post on this last Octo­ber ]

For a while plants van­ished from the local nurs­eries while they were off get­ting “treated.” The plants returned with labels detail­ing their treat­ment, and ver­i­fy­ing that they were legal to sell. Also, there’s a require­ment that any com­mer­cially grown fruit must be cleaned prior to sale. But for­tu­nately there’s no restric­tion on trans­port­ing and shar­ing home grown fruit.

Unless you have a young or dwarf tree, shar­ing fruit is some­thing you almost have to do when the cit­rus trees do their thing. I was pulling grape­fruits off my tree this morn­ing, think­ing about doing some shar­ing myself, when I saw this unusual fruit in the mid­dle of the tree, cour­tesy the kids next door.

Dri­ving home from my father’s the after­noon ended with some birth­day bal­loons. Here are just a cou­ple of more than a half dozen that were air­borne for the sun­set rides they offer out of Del Mar. My father is a cau­tious human being and would never be caught dead in any­thing like a hot air bal­loon, but it seemed like they were help­ing him cel­e­brate his day…

March 08 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: Asian citrus psyllid • birthdays • citrus | 3 Comments »

under citrus quarantine

The last cou­ple times I’ve gone plant-shopping to one of my favorite nurs­eries I’ve noticed a big line of yel­low police tape stretched in front of the cit­rus plants. A sign nearby states that the plants are under quar­an­tine and can’t be pur­chased. (Good thing I planted my tan­ger­ine last year…)

The quar­an­tine that has impacted the nurs­ery is one that has been imposed on much of the county. Accord­ing to the press release from the Cal­i­for­nia Depart­ment of Food and Agri­cul­ture (omi­nously dated Sep­tem­ber 11) “the quar­an­tine area includes 1,181 square-miles and extends from the inter­na­tional bor­der with Mex­ico up the coast to High­way 78, east to Ramona, and south along local roads and high­ways to the inter­na­tional bor­der at Tecate, Mex­ico.” (The release has a link to a pdf of a map of the bound­eries, but the link was dead as of Sat­ur­day after­noon.) That’s basi­cally all of the city plus a whole pile of ‘burbs.

My gar­den tan­ger­ine is new as of last fall so I’ve been pay­ing a cer­tain amount of atten­tion to it. I also have a grape­fruit, but it’s gen­er­ally self-sustaining and doesn’t require much atten­tion. But after return­ing from the nurs­ery Sat­ur­day I hap­pened to look at the plant and saw some insect dam­age of a sort I’d never noticed before.

That sent me all over the web, look­ing to see if this was the sort of dam­age that would be done by the lit­tle beast that has caused all this com­mo­tion, the Asian cit­rus psyl­lid. There were lots of mugshots of this fairly ugly bug, plus descrip­tions of the plant-wilting dis­ease that it can spread. Nei­ther seemed to be what I had going on in the back yard, however.

It turns out the trou­ble in my lit­tle Tahiti was caused instead by the cit­rus leafminer, an insect first detected in the gen­eral area in 2000. Some bugs can be con­sid­ered basi­cally benign, and this one is one of those. This is from its rap sheet from the Kern County Coop­er­a­tive Exten­sion Ser­vice a cou­ple years ago.

For most, cit­rus leafminer will likely be noth­ing more than a nui­sance, since research from Florida has not linked this pest to any reduc­tions in yield or qual­ity of fruit. How­ever, it is unlikely that there are many farm­ers who get plea­sure see­ing the beau­ti­ful leaves in their orchards become all twisted and knurled. The real prob­lems with cit­rus leafminer are while the trees are in the nurs­ery and dur­ing their first one to three years of devel­op­ment after plant­ing. Dur­ing this time cit­rus leafminer, which loves to feed inside new flush leaves, can cause suf­fi­cient dis­tor­tion and dam­age to caused stunt­ing of the plants.

More of a nui­sance for mature plants, it sounds like. And the dam­age was on only a fairly small por­tion of the plant’s new leaves. That allowed me to appre­ci­ate the fact that the wan­der­ing insect pat­terns inside the leaf have a cool, loopy, geo­met­ri­cal grace to them. I can live with a lit­tle twist­ing and knurl­ing now that I know it doesn’t seem to bother the plant too much…

October 26 2008 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: Asian citrus psyllid • citrus • citrus leafminer • grapefruits • plant quarantines • tangerines | 3 Comments »