[ Lost in the Landscape ]

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 »

where’s waldo?

There used to be a large, mature tan­ger­ine tree in the yard across street. When the mid­win­ter peak sea­son came around, all the neigh­bors could help them­selves to amaz­ingly good tan­ger­ines. (What they say about home-grown toma­toes being way bet­ter than store-bought can be said of tan­ger­ines as well.)

There was a minor neigh­bor­hood tragedy when a new neigh­bor moved in across the street. Think­ing that the tan­ger­ine was a big lemon tree, one of them pointed the tree out to her gar­dener. “Take that thing out,” she instructed.

When the neigh­bors, one by one, told her how much they had loved the tan­ger­ine tree the new owner got increas­ingly despon­dent. Turns out she really loved tan­ger­ines and never would have had the tree taken out if she knew what it was.

To avoid future tragedies of this sort at least two of us on the street put in our own tan­ger­ine trees last year. Mine flow­ered nicely for sev­eral weeks this past spring, and the flow­ers turned to lit­tle baby tan­ger­ines. It was look­ing like the tree’s first crop would net a cou­ple dozen nice fruits this season.

Then some heat waves hit, time dur­ing which I hadn’t given the plant enough sup­ple­men­tal water­ing. The tree sulked and dropped all but three or four fruits. I’d been count­ing my tan­ger­ines before they’d been ripened and picked. More sad days.

Then, this past month, the tree started bloom­ing again. I can’t say that I’ve ever noticed a dou­ble bloom­ing period on cit­rus, but my life expe­ri­ence with cit­rus has been with one tree of the fairly reli­able Oro Blanco grape­fruit. (The grape­fruit has bloomed once annu­ally and fruited heav­ily in alter­nat­ing years.)

I made a point of water­ing the tree heav­ily while it was bloom­ing, and the plant is now cov­ered with more green fruit than it had last spring. Count­ing them is like a “where’s Waldo” exer­cise, with more lit­tle fruits seem­ingly appear­ing out of plain sight. This branch has at least seven on it.

It’s pre­ma­ture to start count­ing ripe tan­ger­ines at this point, but at least now it’s start­ing to look like a rea­son­able first crop for a young plant. This vari­ety, the Frost Owari clone of Sat­suma tan­ger­ines, bears heav­ily in Decem­ber. (Sat­sumas are also referred to as “man­darins.”) Expect baby pic­tures as they start to turn color…

October 13 2008 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: Frost Owari tangerine • mandarins • neighbors • tangerines | 2 Comments »