Citrus Trees

Thirty-nine listings sit on this page, and they are not spread evenly across the fruit bowl. Ten carry Mandarin in the name, three carry Lemon. Worth knowing before you scroll, because the lemon choice is short and made quickly, while the mandarin end asks you to pick a season first. Two of those ten are Ellendale, technically a tangor rather than a true mandarin.

Past the household names

Three pummelos are listed, K13 and Carters Red among them, and a pummelo is a different proposition to a grapefruit: thick spongy pith, firm segments that pull apart dry, mild and sweet where a grapefruit is sharp. Warmth decides it. Fruit off a cool coastal site comes in coarse and dull. Yuzu is the opposite case, handling frost that would ruin a lemon, which puts it within reach of a Canberra garden or the Adelaide Hills, though it is slow into bearing and the thorns are long and rigid. Calamondin earns its keep as an ornamental first, carrying flower and fruit at the same time for much of the year, and it clips into a ball or a standard without sulking.

Why six varieties appear twice

Tahitian Lime, Kaffir Lime, Imperial and Ellendale mandarin, Washington Navel and Maltese Blood orange each carry two listings. Grafted in the title is not a clean divider, because the plain Tahitian Lime page says its trees are grafted too and tells you to rub off any shoot below the graft union. What the grafted listings claim for themselves is a rootstock picked for vigour and soil tolerance, and fruit sooner than a seedling would give it. The size ladders differ as well. The plain Ellendale runs from a 165mm pot up to 300L. The grafted Ellendale is a 500mm and nothing else. Open both before you commit.

Reading the size ladder

Two systems share these selectors: pot diameters in millimetres, and bags in litres. Read the millimetres as volume, since it climbs cubically. A 300mm pot holds about fifteen litres of mix, a 400mm about thirty-five, a 500mm close to seventy. That puts a 5L bag near a 200mm pot and a 10L near a 265mm. The middle of the range is where the choice actually lives: 200mm, 250mm, 300mm, 400mm and 500mm each turn up on a dozen listings or more, with a 5L on thirteen and a 10L on nine. The small end is better stocked than the grid suggests, since eleven of the thirty-nine open at a pot under 200mm.

Seven listings open at 100L with nothing under it, and they tend to be the uncommon varieties. Seville Orange, the marmalade orange rather than an eating one, comes in that single grade. So does Thorny Mandarin. Fifteen listings carry a 100L somewhere on the selector. Watered, that bag is a two-person lift, and the hole wants digging before the truck turns up.

Who should think twice

Grapefruit needs a long hot season to build sugar. Marsh Grapefruit performs through Queensland, inland New South Wales and the Riverland, and gives thick skinned sour fruit in cool districts. Ray Ruby is the same story with red flesh that colours poorly where summers are short. Gloves matter more than buyers expect, too: Thorny Mandarin is armed with fine spines through the canopy, Kaffir Lime carries genuinely nasty thorns, and Lisbon Lemon puts vicious ones on young vigorous wood. Keep all three well back from a path or a washing line. And one plant on this grid is not a citrus at all. Satsuma Dwarf is a Japanese plum, not self fertile, and it wants another Japanese plum flowering within bee range, so it belongs with the fruit trees.

Feeding, collar rot, gall wasp and the way a potted citrus declines in its third year are all covered in growing citrus in Australian gardens and pots.