How to Prune a Citrus Tree

How are you doing today? What’s up? God, this will work today. Going to come pruning this trees this are citruses take a look. The doggie, is guarding the citrus and you also have a kitty cat that does a thing vices in case we have any need, I was here last time and last time we where here we re-mulch the bottom we used rock dust, we used compose and this stuff here is oak leaf. You vary at home oak leaf mold well this is where it comes from and eventually what will happened is this will start to break down. This is the local mold it’s all I’m here, this is what it does to the soil. This is why we underneath the citruses. It’s going to take a while for this stuff to all break down and change it’s structure of the soil and everything we still want to feed this we still wants to take care of it. so what were going to do today is talk a little bit about pruning. Some basic pruning techniques before we start pruning you want to first of all have a good tools, secondly you have to understand that if you spread diseases by using a tools by not cleaning them. If I went to a citrus it had a disease and then I came to this one and prune it this one will get the disease too. Alcohol works really well, I like to using my favorite cleaner, citrus products is called Orange TKO it’s a wonderful clean product that doesn’t have any control in this and still set. Usually for a lot of things you’re going to find out that I do use it for everything but you can really easily go and point it in the right direction see. That will kill all the disease were on contact. Then all you got to do is just wipe it off and you just do that on the regular basis when your pruning that way you make sure you don’t spreading any diseases you also do that in the roses. Any plant as you want to prune back any disease plants you want to prune back, okay. So here’s a citrus tree a little here last, we put the mulch and everything around it and we get a filing you see all this is new growth all types of new growth here. There are some problems with this tree that’s what – if you look at those leaves this is disease right here see. And if you look real closely you see the ants, the ants spread the disease around because they take them off from the flowers, if you look even closely, you’ll see the little scales go up and down the plant right here. The little scales, they were heard by the a foot by the ants which attack the tree if not an ant is not on the new leaf you see this are brand new leaf okay but what I do see is another disease over here. And if you will turn it this way you’ll see it down right there, see that one right there. It’s called “Piece leaf curl” because usually its predominant on peas leaf with the same disease and the same problem and if you was to look underneath that you might see the disease and the bugs doing that. Okay, so part of the problem the tree is having is that you know not being fed right in everything it can trigger stress out. If you look and see the ants, the ants are pretty much are going up to the tree, so before we leave today were going to actually do a little ant treatment around here to keep the ants from going up and down the tree. So next thing were going to do is, I’m going to show you some spots that need to be pruned. Actually this tree is really not too doing to bad if you look up into the tree you’ll see it’s kind of, it’s really airy the main thing about pruning is the section right underneath the tree here. When the trunk this whole area here you can see how it has been cleaned off already. You don’t want to have a lot of stuff in here. The second rule is if you follow the trunk you followed, you don’t to have things going off the main trunk. You see this main trunk here you don’t want to have a lot of stuff coming off from here. They’re all actually be from all of the other, the secondary branches coming out. So this is nice and clean see it’s all cleaned here it doesn’t have a right all kinds of stuff coming out. So it’s not really a bad case it has been taken care of fairly well. There are some dead, a few dead branches here and there but a basic rule of some, if you take a look over here, this branch for example. So in this branch you see that if anything that goes down we want to cut prune and then you always want it, here’s a dead right over here see this is dead. See that’s dead, this is dead, so you want to prune that, so in this case it wasn’t a really bad you just have to prune some of the dead thing. See that’s just a weak branch and when it’s weak it becomes disease. And when disease is is perfect food for the aphids and the aphids and then they make this nice nectar for the ants. So if you look at here you will see is like really thick. So we want to thin it out from the inside, okay were allowing this stuff is going on the inside which is not doing any good at all to the tree. So you see this is not going to do any good. Not enough light to reduce, it takes a lot of energy, so you get rid of it. All this little ones underneath here are not going to do any good. this is might be very better but again it’s going down and it’s not going to get enough light to do anything. So if you take a look you’ll see a lot cleaner. So were going to eventually go through this whole tree. And pruning it off like this so it has and were going to do is the next series and I’ll be back next week to do a little more. So one of the things you would today’s to an ant tree minute run the citrus to keep the eyes off of it. Interesting enough what were going to use is citrus, they get the citrus, get down. So I’m going to put a little bit of the amount and not absolutely important you’re all good to learn this tricks, okay. Sometimes I use a bit of my favorite penny roil oil, and if you have smell, this you don’t need a whole lot, like that much, okay that’s probably too much but you cant over do it. So we’ll close that penny roil oil, canola oil, and we put maybe about a half a cup of canola oil. Then we’ll add some water to it and I’m going to show you what I do to the ants. So here are the ants, were going to take this mixture, were just going to spray it right around trunk, and were going to go like this and make sure you get all over the ants right. And were going to try to go up the trunk a little bit, you don’t have to spray the all whole tree just spray the trunk. Next time we come were going to actually spray the whole tree what were going do is were going to spray with the citrus. With a natural salt from other kinds of things so, see that will, this will kill the ants on contact, lets go do the other citrus. And then what we’ll do is remove this back like that and then I’ll spray the leaves too so that the ants get the idea that we don’t want them around here at the moment. So let’s go take a look at the other citrus and see what we could do for that one too. “Holly, cow” they’re there, so here we go and we’ll going to go ahead spray at the trunk all the way around. I will tell you we had smell evasion you can smell the penny roil oil and remember if you ones could smell it the insect will smell a thousand times more. Very, very intense for them and then were going to spray all around the trunk, spray over here you don’t want to miss any area. If you miss a spot they will use that to climb up of it, get as much up here as we can and then we go right around here, like this and get this off put the leaves all back again and then we just spray on the leaves. Next we go, we come back and we’ll take a look and see what the ants have to say about it they’re probably be back after the this stuff disappears. This will last about a few days it will be gone the ants will say “Well, it must have been a strange pluck of nature and then and they will come back and try to establish again and were going to do from more permanent.