Plucking Produce From Your Trees Is Just Not That Difficult

There is absolutely nothing like having your own lemon tree in the yard especially as single lemons are ridiculously costly. It is also fantastic if you have a lemon tree in your area where the owners are happy for you to select their lemons or perhaps better still, select them for you and pop them in basket on the veranda with please help yourself sign. Citrus is in the Rutaceae and is abundant in vitamin C. There are Citrus x limon 'Eureka', 'Lisbon' and 'Meyer', C. sinensis (orange), C. x paradisis (grapefruit) and C. japonica (kumquat). They are an evergreen tree and love a warm well drained pipes sunny position. They do not like damp, clay soils or frosts. They are exactly what we call starving and need big amount of fertiliser particularly nitrogen, used four times a year. Their attraction is their shiny green leaves and white flowers that are greatly perfumed. The other advantage about them are they flower in late autumn/winter and produce fruit in late winter/early spring when great deals of individuals have colds.

They are a great tree, but they do have some severe insect problems. One such bug that has become a serious http://treeislife.over-blog.com/about-us.html bug in Melbourne is the dreaded Gall Wasp. It is a native parasite whose environment is around the border of NSW and Queensland. Unfortunately, it has taken a preference to citrus specifically lemons and has moved south. The rotten little pest burrows into the stems, causing them to swell which distorts the branches and triggers them to die back. Regrettably, there are no chemical controls and you can not entirely eliminate it. To manage this parasite, you need to utilize an Integrated Insect Management System (IPM). This is a system that takes the reliance away from chemicals and motivates gardeners to utilize physical and biological controls. For example, utilizing ladybirds to eat aphids and hang sticky traps in lemon trees to catch the gall wasp.

To manage it utilizing the IPM system gardeners need to understand its life-cycle and interrupt it to reduce the varieties of woman. Around August/September, the tiny little female wasp lays her eggs on the branches of the tree and the larvae burrow into the stems which causes them to swell. In November/December they burrow out, leaving holes in the gall and fly off.

When you first notice the swells in August/September, the first technique is to prune them. If the infection is bad, this can be a considerably reduce the tree's height. Because they keep being assaulted by the wasp and then pruned, with young trees it significantly sets them back. They never get a possibility to grow. The other downside is if the tree is very large, then it is impossible to prune them all out. There is no point pruning off the galls in November/December, since they have actually bored out and left.

The other technique is again in August/September to hang sticky traps in the tree and catch the women. Sadly, these traps capture all the bugs, whether bad or great and you need to replace them routinely due to the fact that they end up being full. You may need to hang 3 or four. Likewise, again in November/December, you need to hang fresh traps routinely to capture the emerging pests.