Good afternoon, everyone. Today,
we're doing some citrus planting here at the Epic Homestead. I want to show you,
as I get through my fence here, just some of the ideas.
I'm actually really excited about the citrus.
One of my favorite fruits ever to eat.
So much variety and they grow really well here in San Diego.
But I'm walking all the way over here.
We actually have an existing citrus that looks absolutely terrible,
I will say that. Now here's what's going on with this one.
You've got two citrus.
I think this might be the rootstock of whatever was over here, right?
So it may have had like a water shoot come up and become its own tree.
It kind of looks like an Eureka lemon, not a hundred percent sure,
but it's in very bad shape. And then over here we have this grapefruit,
which I mean it's fruiting but the fruit looks bad. Except for that one,
that one actually looks pretty juicy and tasty if you ask me.
But the leaves are all beat up and it's oversized and it's not in an optimal
location. So this might come out, I'm not a hundred percent sure.
But what we put in over here, the very first tree at the Epic Homestead,
this is a Washington navel orange.
So this one went in and I've got my friend Jacques coming over.
He's going to help me plant one, two, three, four, five more citrus today.
Maybe even more, if we see. So come along with me,
Epic Homestead Citrus Alley is going down today.
Here's just a note on why I'm doing citrus on this hedge right here.
And the reason why is because number one, I'll have more room.
That little white picket fence will go over that hedge as I actually own that
hedge. And it will be this style of fence right here. Secondly,
this is an evergreen plant, right?
And so what this will do is all throughout the year it will block off a little
bit of this view of the street and the neighbors and create sort of like a
secret garden type of look. So we've got enough space for one every about three,
four feet. So we've got one, two, three, four,
five, and maybe six right there. And if this ends up coming out,
I can do one and two.
So I can technically get seven or eight on this hedge right here. All right.
My friend Jacques is here to help and you can see we've got one, two, three,
four, five, six plus two more that are hanging out over there.
But I'll just run you through the varieties here on the Homestead channel.
We've got the Nagami kumquat. We have, what's this one?
This is a Bearss lime. We've got a Valencia orange,
this is my juicing orange. Cara cara navel, very classic one, very popular one.
This one, gold nugget, I've heard it's very, very tasty, very good.
So I'm excited about that.
I've got a Moro blood orange here and then over there I've got the Owari
mandarin and one more orange. So these are all coming out. I'll show you.
You can see over there, we've got some markers placed out.
So you can see there's the Washington navel we put in and we've got one, two,
three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 technically.
I'm probably not going to go that close but Jacques, who is over there,
he's helping me out today. He measured out this distance here.
So what we need to do is we need to figure out, okay,
which ones do we put where? There's a Washington navel there? Do I go oranges,
lemons, limes, or do I mix and match?
I think I'm going to try to go with more of a mix and match play.
And let's just get to it. Alrighty. They're all laid out now.
The final orientation is probably not going to be this though. But we have one,
two, three, four, five, six, seven,
eight with technically room for two more.
And so what I'm probably going to do is just put the eight right here and we'll
probably end up putting one more right there.
I just haven't selected that variety yet. And this tree might come out.
So now it's time to play around with the spacing. First tree is in for the day.
Nagami kumquat in. Just watering it in.
Next I think I'm going to do the pink lemonade here. It's a variegated leaf,
really beautiful plant. Sometimes people struggle with this one.
We'll see if I also struggle. I hope not. It's in a good sunny location.
Typically a variegated plant wants a little bit more sun because again,
it doesn't have the ability to photosynthesize in the variegated areas.
This is a smaller pot so we're digging a smaller hole.
So check out this pink lemonade. You can see it's not too root bound.
The bottom is actually okay, but you still want to kind of score the edges.
You don't want to necessarily cut these roots up,
but you do want to score the edges a little bit and break it up.
Otherwise they're going to keep spiraling.
So there'll be a full video on the Epic Gardening main channel about this with
Cameron from the busy gardener. But again, it's just a quick little tip for you.
It'll be a little rough. It's not a big deal. These are some tough citrus roots.
We're just getting them out there. Okay. So we're digging.
This up. Look at this. We've got a worm right there in this semi-clay soil.
And then we have some fungal.
Action going on here too. So I'm actually really positive about this soil.
I mean, what do you think? I think it looks great. Yeah. Yeah.
We've got soil tests coming in pretty soon. Yeah. The chips did the work. Oops,
I just shaded him out. But the chips the work. It's okay.
Time to get more digging going. All right, it's about 4:00 PM. now.
Look at that. What is that? Is that a row of citrus in the garden?
What we have going on. So we have the Washington navel orange right here.
Then we move over to the Nagami kumquat.
Over here this is the pink lemonade lemon. So the variegated lemon. Right here,
I believe, what did we do? The Moro blood orange? No,
we did the standard cara cara navel. So the cara cara right there. So we've,
so far, think about it. We've gone orange, kumquat, lemon, orange.
Over here we moved into the Moro blood orange.
So it's still an orange but it's going to give a little bit of a different look.
Then we moved into the Orawi satsuma mandarin. So mandarin, semi orange,
you know, still gonna be a little different. We went with a Bearss lime,
very standard lime. Valencia orange, that's gonna be my juicer.
And then over here we did the gold nugget. Now, what's really cool,
let's see if I can find it, we found a lot of good soil life going down.
There was a root somewhere in here.
There was a LOT of fungal action going on and we saw a lot of earthworms down
there. I'm actually pretty pleased with the life.
I thought it'd be too heavy in clay, but we got this really,
really good amount of mulch. I'm standing on it right now.
You guys remember from one of the blogs, we had basically
eight hardwood trees just chipped directly into the yard.
And that's been sitting here going through some rains,
going through the winter and actually has not really super-improved the soil,
but kept it nice and moist and pliable. And fostered a little bit of soil life.
So I'm really pleased about that.
So what's gonna happen here eventually is it'll be super tall, not super tall,
maybe like eight feet right across. And then honestly,
we just tasted this grapefruit here and it actually tastes pretty good.
But just think about it. Sometimes you've got to pay a heavy price.
This tree is gnarled.
It's actually two varieties and all these trees are the same height and age.
I'm probably guys, going to take this tree out and we'll put one right there,
one right there and one right there.
So I can top it off with three more varieties of citrus.
I have one more thing to do today with the citrus.
And that is to whitewash the trunks. I want to protect them from sunburn,
especially as we move into spring/summer.
So I'm going to do that really quickly with an organic whitewash spray.
The idea here is pretty simple.
I've got this product from Charles over at IV Organic, it's called White-Wash.
It's a completely organic product. And of course summer sunburn,
winter sunscald. The thing with citrus is, let me get my little brush here,
is these are not used to being exposed to full sun.
Cause typically you'd have a nice canopy around this plant, right?
And it'd be probably growing amongst other plants and shaded out.
And so the southern exposure, it's coming in just like that.
We're going to want to protect that at least at the beginning stages of its
life. So a little dip, dippy dip,
we'll come in and we just paint it up,
block it off and protect the plant. You don't have to go too far up,
probably go in to about the graft point. And that's about it. So this has got,
I mean, I can even smell it.
I've got like cinnamon in here and some other stuff that also protects a little
bit against pest and disease, some fungal issues, things like that.
So I'm going to plant up the rest of these,
paint up the rest of these and you'll see what's going on.
The sun is setting on another day here at the Epic.
Orchard. I feel like it counts as an orchard now because take a look,
take a look. Ooh! Look at that. Man, I'm so excited about this!
They're all whitewashed up. We planted them pretty high.
Actually on the main Epic Gardening channel we will have a full 101, A to Z,
kind of a long meaty video on how to plant citrus.
All the things that you need to consider. But for now,
thanks for joining me on today's blog. I want to leave you with a little crispy,
sexy outro of this.
Orchard.