Hi everybody this is Noelle from Petitti Garden Centers and I'm here at Casa Verde I'm surrounded
by Citrus fruit I'm so happy it's wintertime and one of our favorite houseplants for continuous
scented wonderfully fragrant blooming is the citrus tree everything from your lemons your
oranges your limes and so on and so forth we tend to grow them quite a bit in northeast
Ohio and what's great about them is that they can grow inside over the winter for us and
then they make a great patio plant for us outside after the last chance of frost we
can start to get them outside usually about May in our area so to start out with our Citrus
trees indoors they really want bright indirect light to full sun so here's the thing how
do we get full sun in northeast Ohio in the winter you've gotta get it in a southern window
western exposure window eastern exposure window as much bright direct sunlight as you can
get if you don't have that and its gonna kind of be in an indirect light area thats fine
the foliage the plant will do fine you won't get a lot of flowering you definitely won't
get a lot of fruiting so if you can supplement so try grow lights try adding flourescent
lighting or whatever you can get supplemental lighting will definitely help this plant flourish
for you okay temperature wise we are basically talking about household temperatures in the
winter they really don't like to go below about 55 degrees and you can go all the way
up to 85 - 90 degrees wow talk about a hot house so again usually if you can mimic as
much of the tropics as possible thats gonna help your citrus tree as well watering wise
they love humidity so again spray misting in the morning setting them on humidity trays
with pebbles and water is a great thing to do and then their soil you actually want to
keep them again on the dry side of watering don't over water these plants don't let them
sit in water okay so again throughly moisten the soil let the water drain out and then
go ahead and put them back in their place or take that water out of the drip tray below
them discard it and put them back on the drip tray so thats always gonna help another thing
with citrus is that their fertilization is actually more acidic they appreciate an acidic
food and an acidic soil pH so I'm sure you've heard of muracid holly-tone even citrus tone
now so there is citrus tone organic food from Espoma that will help with these plants specifically
to help keep them blooming and keeping them fruiting for us we normally won't feed them
in the wintertime again low light levels they're not using a lot of their water a lot of their
food but during the growing season again late March beginning of April fertilizing them
regularly getting them on that schedule and taking that all the way through the end of
September beginning of October when you're starting to bring them back indoors okay what's
the other thing that I wanted to mention continuous flowering look at this so they are continuously
producing these beautiful buds in clusters once you get flowers and fruit set you can
actually thin out the small fruit so you can get larger fruit on the branches do be careful
if youre pruning this plant actually late winter early spring is the best time to prune
it to kind of take care of some of the size remove some of the damaged branches what have
you but be aware that they can be thorny too so just when you get your hands in there get
your pruners in there be very careful other than that keep an eye on them citrus are notorius
for having indoor household pests we like to use neem oil products organic insecticital
soaps on them to help relieve them of any type of issue other than that they do really
really well for us so enjoy!