What better to talk about when it's cold like this,
then a semi-tropical plant like citrus, Stan.
tell us a little bit about your citrus operation.
Well, I have always been interested in citrus, even
as a child.
And I got my first citrus tree, a Satsuma Mandarin
back in the mid '80s and planted it at my back door,
and it grew and was successful and started producing fruit.
And so folks saw it, the meter reader, the gas man.
Man, I'd like to have one of those.
So that kind of put me in the citrus business.
I learned how to graft.
And I've been growing and selling citrus trees
and citrus fruit ever since.
That's good.
And instead of having a bunch of those big trees around the desk
here, we decided we'd have some pictures.
Back a few years ago, when you had a great citrus
harvest, before this cold snap this year.
Tell us a little bit about what we have here, Stan.
STAN: Right.
Well this particular picture that we have here,
is a Satsuma Mandarin orange, which
is a very cold hardy citrus cultivar they
used to survive temperatures down into the mid teens,
you know, with no problem, once they
get some age and some size.
That's another shot of the Satsuma Mandarin orange.
And there's some acreage of that being planted in South Carolina
now, other than mine.
TONY: A lot of people don't think
you can grow those in South Carolina.
STAN: It can be done, and I've been doing it quite a while.
That was our harvest in 2016.
That was boxes full of oranges, and you'll
notice the trees hanging with fruit in the background there.
We harvested approximately 5,000 pounds of citrus in 2016.
And most of those were sold to a food co-op.
TONY: Wow.
I love the flavor of those.
They are sweet and no seeds in them.
They're a type of tangerines, is that right?
STAN: oranges are a type of tangerine,
but we would commonly call it a pangerine.
And they are seedless.
The cuties that the kids are so crazy about now, that's
a form of a mandarin orange.
TONY: So you don't just pull it off the plant,
you have to clip it?
STAN: You can pull them off, but if you do,
it's going to pull the plug out of the end of the fruit
and it will deteriorate fairly quickly.
So it's best to take snips when you go out to the citrus grove
and snip them off.
TONY: So you protect them a little bit
from the cold and all during these cold times?
STAN: Right.
Right.
I just invested in some frost bags
that are supposed to give you like eight
degrees of frost protection.
This sponge bonded material it just fits down over the tree.
And then we had a sprinkler system in place too,
that we ran on the cold nights to ice the trees down.
So we have, every year right before Thanksgiving,
we have a cold, Southeast cold hardy citrus expo.
Right.
I started that back in, oh I don't know, 2003 or 2004.
Anyhow, it's moved all around the southeast.
It's been as far north as Virginia Beach, Virginia.
We've been to Alabama.
This past year it was in Savannah,
and next year it's going to be in Valdosta, Georgia.
And the southeastern citrus expo does have a Facebook page.
Anybody interested in attending.
TONY: Yeah, and I've been a judge for his citrus expo
since you started it back, what is it,
about 15 or 16 years ago?
STAN: I think this will be a 15 or 16 coming up this year
and you've been a judge every year.
Tony has drove countless miles all the way down to Valdosta,
Georgia, I mean to Thomasville, Georgia and Virginia
Beach and Alabama and all points in between.
So Tony has been a true friend of our citrus.
I love the citrus.
You know, I grew up, that's what you got for Christmas.
Is a little box of some citrus, and maybe an apple or so,
and one pair of non-holy jeans.
They wouldn't be popular now, though.
The non-holy jeans would not be popular.
That's right.
Well you are going to show us a little bit about how
to graft citrus.
Tell us about this plant you have here.
OK.
Well I brought two examples.
A lot of you're probably familiar with seeing,
these are called bitter lemons.
It doesn't get cold enough in South Carolina
to even damage these.
I've had reports of people from Connecticut and Kentucky
and places like that growing these.
But they make a wonderful rootstock.
And if you cut into one, they are
loaded with seed on the inside.
You probably get 40, 50 seed out of one plant.
And that's what we sow every fall
to make our rootstocks that we grow
to graft our citrus trees onto.
They are bitter.
That is the key word.
But we're going to do a grafting demonstration of that.
And I was telling you, we had the two different forms
of citrus.
This is called a standard trifolient of bitter lemon,
and this one over here is the flying dragon.
Kind of curled up, and all kind of mauled.
But it produces the same type fruit the bitter lemon.
But this one, if you graft on to it,
the flying dragon will make a dwarf citrus
tree that will only get three or four feet tall.
How tall are some of your citrus?
We've got some probably 18 feet tall.
Wow
Yeah.
But anyway we're going to do the grafting demo now.
And I'm going to show folks how you--
TONY: He's taking some of the lateral limbs off.
Right.
And I did want to say to that doing
a grafting on a citrus tree or any other tree
is just like doing surgery.
You wouldn't want a doctor to go operate
on you with unclean instruments or whatever.
So we do take some rubbing alcohol
and clean our instruments good before we graft.
And so the first thing we do is remove any branches
and get one straight stand here.
And I have to have glasses to do this now.
TONY: That's our age, Stan.
That's our age counting on us, that's right.
But we just cut it off about six, eight inches up the stack.
And I take a straight edge razor blade
and we put it about halfway in.
And we just tap it down about an eighth of an inch down.
TONY: You split the stem.
STAN: You split the stem.
TONY: Right in the middle.
And then in this particular instance,
we're going to do a navel orange tree.
And we're going to remove all the leaves,
because if you leave the leaves on there,
that will have a tendency for it to dry out.
And what you want to do with this little stem is just,
basically, like what I call a flat edge screwdriver.
You want to get a cut off of one side
then flip it over and do a cut off the other side.
TONY: It's like a V on it.
STAN: Yes, just like a regular little screwdriver.
And you've got this little piece of bark left right there
and you want to line your cambium layers up.
TONY: That's right up under the bark is where the cambium is.
STAN: That's right.
TONY: So we want to get it straight.
STAN: Right.
And we want to just insert that there
and we want to make sure that they line up here.
And that looks fairly close.
And this is called poly budding tape.
It stretches like shrink wrap.
At one time people used to have to use rubber
bands and that type of thing.
But now, this just binds the--
TONY: Just wrap it around there pretty tight and hold it in.
STAN: Binds the scion in there.
And you wrap it all the way up.
That's going to help hold the moisture in.
TONY: That way you don't have to put a bag or anything over it.
STAN: No bag.
No moisture, anything.
And that's it, you just leave it there.
Usually in about six weeks, four to six weeks, I
put these in a warm greenhouse and you can go in there
and you'll see little tiny green growth starting to grow.
And at that time we just unwrap it and let it grow.
With this southeast citrus expo, we have a little problem.
And that's called citrus greening.
And that keeps people from taking citrus
from one area to the next.
[INAUDIBLE]
Citrus greening is caused by a little insect called citrus
psyllid that came in from Asia.
They think it came into Miami, Florida on a flight
from some country in Asia.
And what happens when that little psyllid
bites into some new growth on a tender citrus tree.
It's basically like giving that citrus tree,
would be AIDS in humans, but it's
a disease called citrus greening in citrus.
And it causes the fruit quality to decline,
it causes the tree to decline, and eventually die.
And it has been wreaking havoc with the citrus industry
in Florida.
So unless you're dealing with a government certified
green house, it is illegal to bring citrus trees out
of the state of Florida.
Like at these roadside stands that people stop at some time.
I've had people call me and say they stopped at the agriculture
station to show them that they had bought a citrus tree,
because it says any agriculture products pull over to the right
and get them confiscated.
Oh my.
So you don't want to buy anything
at some of these roadside stands in Florida and bring it up.
And even in South Carolina there's
two counties that had it.
We have two counties I think, maybe three.
I know Charleston County was under quarantine, Beaufort
County, and maybe Colleton County down
on the lower southeastern coast of South Carolina.
But after this winter that we've had,
I don't know whether we'll have a problem with citrus psyllids
any more.
They probably, I would think, were wiped out by the cold.
But anyway we willl--
I hope it's a lot of insects out
there's wiped out from the cold this year.
Right.
We hope a lot of them.
Well thank you, Stanley.