Dwarf Fruit / Citrus trees

[Zero102]

This is sort of a food question, I mean, they make food ;) Really it was here or general, sorry if I have the wrong forum.

I am starting a bit of an indoor plant collection and there are a couple that I am looking for but am having a bit of a hard time finding.

I am trying to find some dwarf citrus trees. Lemon / Lime / Orange. I have heard the best time to get these is in some asian stores around Chinese New Years, but I don't really know where to go (its not like there are just 1 or 2 stores that fit this description in the city). I checked Sunnyside and they have some very weak looking short ones for $35, which is pretty overpriced, and they only have lemon/lime, no oranges.

Also, I am looking for a dwarf cavendish plant, which is a kind of dwarf banana tree. Everybody at every store I go to just kind of looks at me like I am crazy when I ask for these. Does anybody have one? Anybody care to share where they got it from (if it is local)?

[Kritafo]

We have a dwarf lemon, tangerine and pomegranate. We however bought them in the summer at http://www.dnagardens.com/ This is our 3rd year for the Pomegrante and have had fruit for 2 of them.

The exotics are listed here. http://www.dnagardens.com/EXOTIC%20FRUITS.htm


So we have a lemon that is just starting to turn a lighter shade of green, and a pomegranate that will be ready around New Years, and the bloom on our tangerine got bumped off by the dog.

You may want to contact Golden Acre and see what they have. Also some local florists that carry exotics, sometimes Safeway even has dwarf trees.

Please post if you find a dwarf Cavendish, I would love to get one as well.

Good luck in your search.

[Zero102]

Wow, wicked information. Thanks a lot mate!
I was spending all of my time searching for stuff in Calgary, since if you don't specify somewhere specific you just end up with retailers in florida who won't ship in winter and won't ship across the border.

Those guys look promising. Have you bought anything from them recently? How is their pricing?

I hadn't really thought of safeways. I am going there tomorrow morning anyways so I'll ask some of the people who work there. And yes, golden acre, of course. I have been out of town for 2 years so I don't remember a lot of the shops around here.

I'll keep you posted if I find a dwarf cavendish. I know that flora exotica from Montreal sells them, but they refuse to ship in the winter. I don't even really like bananas, but my wife does (read: this is infinitely more important than me liking them), and if they really taste like banana ice cream like I have heard, then I just may like these bananas.

[Kritafo]

Yes the Cavendish is a creamy tasting banana. Flora Exotics have some interesting items.

DNA Gardens is a fantastic for ultra cold hardy plants for outdoors.

Saskatoon Farm carries many of the same plants but we have had better luck at DNA.

http://www.saskatoonfarm.com/ find out what exotics they have in stock right now. It's a lot closer than DNA. They did have some interesting berry plants such as the gogi plant. . You want to do something now. Grow a pineapple. We are doing this now. This is just one link, but there are many sites with step by step info on how to grow your own plants. http://www.rickswoodshopcreations.com/Pineapple/pineapple.htm

The dwarf tree prices depends on how big you buy them. I bought mine which are about 1 1/2 - 2 ft tall, they were about $50.00 a piece. A little pricey but we have never bought anything from DNA that wasn't top notch.

You may even contact Calhort, they will respond to emails even if your not a member http://calhort.org/home/
and remember the Garden shows in the spring.

On a side note it's easy to have peppers all year long inside as well. We have our plants set up on a Bakers Rack to move them into the sun during the day and out of the way at night. They do require full sun as most of these are tropicals.

[nonlinear]

kritafo,

how big are the dwarf fruit trees, and how many fruits do they produce over time (in say, a month)? is there usually a single fruit growing at a time, or do you get multiple fruits at once? how do fruit sizes compare to sizes you would find in the store? I'm just curious how a reduced leaf area would affect whole-tree carbon assimilation, and then allocation to fruits.

this dwarf fruit tree idea sounds awesome, might have to get some of these!

[Kritafo]

My pomegranate is about 3 ft tall and almost as wide. It has 7 fruits on it right now. There would have been more but the plant was outside during the summer and got hit with hail. I had 10 poms last year. They take a very long time to mature.

I normally get the fruit all at the same time, anywhere from now until the end of Jan. Then back to the basement for a rest period.

My lemon and tangerine tree is currently 2 ft tall and has 2 lemons. This is the first year for the lemon and tangerine which has no fruit yet, and the dog bumped off the first bloom just about a week ago.

Without proper pruning these can get to a pretty good height, but we plan on keeping them in the 3 - 5 ft range.

All 3 of these dwarf plants should fruit in the winter months.

[nonlinear]

awesome, thanks! they are bigger than I was thinking... I was thinking they were more like bonsai size LOL

[Zero102]

Originally posted by Kritafo
Yes the Cavendish is a creamy tasting banana. Flora Exotics have some interesting items.

DNA Gardens is a fantastic for ultra cold hardy plants for outdoors.

Saskatoon Farm carries many of the same plants but we have had better luck at DNA.

http://www.saskatoonfarm.com/ find out what exotics they have in stock right now. It's a lot closer than DNA. They did have some interesting berry plants such as the gogi plant. . You want to do something now. Grow a pineapple. We are doing this now. This is just one link, but there are many sites with step by step info on how to grow your own plants. http://www.rickswoodshopcreations.com/Pineapple/pineapple.htm

The dwarf tree prices depends on how big you buy them. I bought mine which are about 1 1/2 - 2 ft tall, they were about $50.00 a piece. A little pricey but we have never bought anything from DNA that wasn't top notch.

You may even contact Calhort, they will respond to emails even if your not a member http://calhort.org/home/
and remember the Garden shows in the spring.

On a side note it's easy to have peppers all year long inside as well. We have our plants set up on a Bakers Rack to move them into the sun during the day and out of the way at night. They do require full sun as most of these are tropicals.


So Saskatoon farms just wrote me back, they don't carry dwarf citrus, dwarf banana or goji berry plants. Took them 2 days to get me a 8 word response.

I hit up safeways and the girl had no idea about any dwarf citrus trees, let alone safeways actually carrying them. Golden Acre doesn't carry any of the plants either.

I emailed DNA gardens at the same time, still no response. Calling them gets a message that their retail center is closed for the season. Sounds like I am out of luck for the winter.

[Kritafo]

Saskatoon farm had gogi plants because I bought one around May 24th. I have on a routine basis found them to be ignorant. Once we ordered 200 strawberry plants they called and said they were ready, we got there and nothing was ready, we had to wait hours for the order.

Safeway has had dwarf citrus in the past but I had hesitated to buy them for fear of bugs, plus most of the people working in the flower area have probably only been there for a month. haha!

DNA will get back to you, they are very small, I will fire off a note myself or call them later this week.

Have you tried any of the flower shops in Chinatown? The only that comes to mind for me is the one that was in Far East Shopping centre, but I am not 100% sure it's still there.

[Kritafo]

Cobblestone Garden Centre has 8 dwarf lemons right now.

http://www.cobblestonegarden.ca/contact.html

I will also PM you.

[Kritafo]

http://www.greengate.ca

Just got off the phone with the Greenhouse and they will be getting their shipments in as the expect March-April-May time frame.

Says they normally have oranges around Chinese New Years like expected and have different varieties of banana's

She does have a few citrus left, I believe they are all lime and she did say they are not so great looking, so you may get a deal on them.

If you get them, let me know. You can fix them up with Vermicompost easy enough I could pop a ziplock full int he mail.

[Zero102]

In the mail? Are you not also located in Calgary? (*googling what vermicompost is*)

You are impressive. I couldn't even find half of these places in the yellowpages and you just know them all. I'll take a trip to cobblestone garden tonight and I'll hit up greengate tomorrow. I have an exam at 3:30-6:30 so I can't make greengate today. Thanks again for all this info!

[Kritafo]

I am in Calgary. If you would like a small ziplock full of vermicompost I would happily gift you some.

I am in very NW in Valley Ridge. We use a lot of different garden centres for items.

[Zero102]

So I went to cobblestone last night. Their plants look 100 times better than the ones at sunnyside. I picked up a small bearss lime tree and a large meyer lemon tree. The lime tree was the best of the bunch but had lost all of the leaves on one side, so the girl gave me half off it. Pretty cool place. Once we got them home we found a _BAD_ spider problem on the lemon and 30-50 afids of the lime. Spent 2 hours cleaning them up last night and will check them for spider mites after today's exam.

Thanks again for your help. Hoping to track down a banana tree still, but my miracle fruit seeds will help keep me busy too. :D

[Kritafo]

Good luck with your plants. Pests can be hard to control, just make sure you keep the plants away from any other house plant of they will all get infected.

Did you just go through leaf by leaf using the "squish" method?

That is what we normally do. You just have to be religious about it.

Aphids are a nasty problem. Most effective thing next to the "squish" method. Yellow container with cooking oil all over it. In the greenhouse we use the no-name ice cream pails in the house we went to the Dollar store and got yelllow (they are attracted to the colour for some reason) plastic beer cups, placed them on a saucer ontop of the soil of the infected plants cover the cup inside and out with cooking oil (any will work) and they will get stuck on the oil.

Too bad about the pest problem.

Good luck with your exam.

[Zero102]

We went through both plants leaf by leaf, wiping the white residue off of them and squishing any bugs we found (one plant had probably 3-5 big spiders and 10-20 little ones, the other has WELL in excess of 100 aphids). After spending a couple hours at this our skin was practically crawling, but we felt good that we had eliminated them all. Apparently we were not thorough enough. The one plant is completely covered in aphids again. Every single leaf you look at has at least one on it, and there are patches of them on the rim of the pot. I think we are going to need something pretty severe to get rid of them. I have some plastic cups that I can cover in cooking oil, I'll try that for tonight to trap most of them.

Luckily the exam went well, so I am back to dealing with the issue at hand again. Unfortunately both plants must remain together since we only have one room we can lock the cats out of (until we know if they are going to try to destroy our plants we want to keep them safe), so the plants have been sitting side-by-side overnight now. I guess we'll just treat them both.

Thanks again for your help and advice. Hopefully in a day or two I can report back that we are aphid free.