It's the start of winter it's a
beautiful sunny day it's a great time to
be in the garden.
so firstly it warms up
your body and you feel great and it just
makes the day feel better if you're
outside doing something it's also a
really good time to get on top of all
those jobs that have been neglected
through the year so I always say here in
the subtropics we have two seasons we
have an in control season which is
autumn and winter when you get things
under control and we have an out of
control season which is spring and
summer which is the growing season when
we get a lot of rain and it's very hard
to keep up on the maintenance so here's
a pretty good example of something
that's got out of control this is a
citron citrus and you can see the
rootstock are just taking over the tree
and if we leave this like this these
root stock are actually going to
dominate the plant and we risk losing
our graft and our Citron tree dying and
what we're going to get left with is a
Trifoliata so this is the Trifoliata
which is the root stock that our Citron
is grafted onto and it's a very thorny
plant we choose this as a root stock
because it's Hardy to heavy wet soils
it's cold hardy so it does better in
cooler conditions and it's a really
vigorous plant so it's perfect to graft
citrus onto but we do need to make sure
we cut off all the suckers and as you
can see in that out-of-control season
this has been neglected so we're going
to get it back under control today so
what we need is some tools good pair of
gardening gloves to protect my hands
I've got a pruning saw and I've got some
cutters and I've got my secretaries
which are always on my hip so you can't
go wrong maintain your tools keep them nice and sharp
we're ready to tackle this job
so here we have our same Citron or
Buddhas Hand tree as it's also called
after we've taken the red stock out and
you can see what a completely different
looking plant it is so I've got my pile
of rootstock behind me and it was nearly
the same volume as that tree but the
easiest way to do it is cut the top off
and that way it gets all the deadly
spikes from your head height and it
makes them easier to actually take from
the bottom or weave your way out of the
existing tree because you don't want to
damage your plant so what we can do now
is we can do a bit of pruning a bit of
shaping to this plant and then in a
couple of weeks time once the weather
starts to warm up we're going to
fertilize it so you're not going to
fertilize it in the dead of winter but
as soon as spring starts to show you're
going to give this tree a good complete
fertilizer so balanced NPK fertilizer
they're heavy feeders and they love it
so that's how to deal with your rootstock
starting get your trees back under
control
in the winter when you have some time
and you want to be outside getting warm
in the garden