Sad story of my citrus collection

Citrus

When I was designing the new garden, the first plants I thought of were citrus trees.  There were all evergreen bushes or trees.  Most of them had en leaves, fragrant flowers and/or beautiful edible fruits. There were endless citrus species/hybrids and variety, my head span when I thought of the potential collection I could have. Everyone could use a fresh lemon or lime.  The orange and mandarin were delicious , nutritious and juicy.  The flowers were heavenly fragrant.  Grapefruits were good for your health.  Pummelos were huge, sweet without the bitterness.  Kumquats had delicious peel and were great for making jams.  The leaves of Kaffir lime were an essential ingredient for the Thai cuisine.  There were also collector's items such as Buddha's hand and finger limes.   The citrus family was both ornamental and practical.

There were so many choices of citrus I could grow.  I searched the internet to see if they would grow well in the coastal San Diego.  To my dismay, many orange, tangerine and grapefruit varieties needed summer heat to produce the sweetness.  So, blood orange, the red fruit with the raspberry-tone juice, was not appropriate. Fortunately, there were still many excellent choices.  After checking out the citrus plants in several nurseries, I purchased a Meyer lemon, Satuma mandarin, OroBlanca Grapefruit, a kumquat and a Washington orange.  These plants flourished in the garden and every winter, I had a wonderful time collecting and eating the delicious fruit.  I felt blessed with the plentiful and delicious harvest.

OroBlanca Grapefruit

Satuma mandarin

Then, disaster struck, I noticed there were some curled leaves with yellow color in the mandarin plant.  In a few months, all the citrus plants were infected.  I watered more frequently, fertilized and sprayed with neem oil.  To no avail, I an year, all of the citrus died except for the Meyer lemon which lost most of leaves.  I felt so bad.  I missed working on these plants, smelled the fragrance of the flower and hand-picked the beautiful fruit.  I also somehow felt that I failed them.  They might survived if I tried harder.  Then I heard about the quarantine of citrus plant in San Diego due to the disease of Huanglongbing, which was transmitted by a pest called the Asian citrus psyllid as it fed on citrus tree leaves and infected the plants with a bacteria Candidatus Liberibacter asiaticus. The affected plants eventually died from the disease. I realized that my plants were infected by this deadly disease.  There was no treatment for the disease except to prevent the presence of the psyllid.  So, sadly I cut down the dead plants. . I am still waiting for a treatment or disease-resistant citrus before I will plant the lovely plant again.

So, not all gardening story  ends with a joy.  But you learned more from failures than from success.   And now I have more space to tried more new plants.  Maybe a star-fruit tree?  Or a Longan tree will be better.....